THE TWEED Volume 3 #08 Thursday, October 21, 2010
GREEN SCENE
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page 11
LOCAL & INDEPENDENT
Shock move to dam Byrrill Creek gets up Luis Feliu
A packed public gallery at Tuesday’s Tweed Shire Council meeting erupted into anger when a last-minute controversial proposal to dam Byrrill Creek was approved with the casting vote of mayor Kevin Skinner. The shock move came after an hour-and-ahalf-long debate over the shire’s water supply augmentation plans when Cr Warren Polglase moved to replace the staff ’s recommendation for raising the existing Clarrie Hall Dam wall by building a completely new dam at Byrrill Creek further upstream. Bewildered residents of the area and supporters in the gallery cried out ‘shame on you’ and ‘this is crazy’, when, with the vote tied at threeall, mayor Skinner joined Crs Polglase and Phil Youngblutt to adopt the dam as the preferred option to boost the shire’s future water supplies. One protester was escorted out of the chamber by a security guard after the mayor requested he be expelled for interjecting. The three factional colleagues pushed ahead with the dam option despite warnings by senior staff and other councillors that any proposed These innovative protesters circumvented rules imposed by councillors banning protest signs and silly costumes. Not even an alerted security new dam could be illegal and would be over- guard understood the meaning of a huge letter emblazoned on six different t-shirts until the wearers lined up at the back of the chamber and stood with chests out to spell out NO DAMS in big capitals. They stood defiant throughout the 90-minute debate, but to no avail. Photo Luis Feliu ruled by the state government.
Determined resistance
He said council had spent more than $150 million over the past four to five years on the shire’s water supply infrastructure ‘all in one direction, we’re making a decision our forefathers thought would come, we’re now up to turning that vision into an option for the future of our water supply’. The reason he chose Byrrill Creek over raising the wall at Clarrie Hall Dam, he said, was because ‘Clarrie Hall Dam will always be there’ and the wall could be raised anytime and that water tanks ‘will happen’. ‘But lots of people forget food security. I recently spent over a month in Europe and food security was an enormous issue, and one all over the world, and what is needed for food security? Water.’ Cr Dot Holdom said she observed the entire community consultation progress ‘and waited until the end’. ‘But to build a dam at Byrrill Creek when we have another option with Clarrie Hall Dam is
Residents and observers were taken by surprise as they had expected council to follow staff recommendations to raise the existing dam wall. Any proposal to build a new dam would take years of studies and encounter determined resistance from many quarters. The tied vote resulted after Cr Joan van Lieshout left the room citing a conflict due to the dam proposal affecting land owned by her family. In the long and heated debate on the plans for boosting the shire’s water supply and demand (water savings) strategies, the six remaining councillors argued the pros and cons, with regular interjections from the gallery. Cr Polglase opened the debate on his move for a new dam, saying it was nothing new as the shire’s ‘forefathers’ (councillors) had ‘spent millions’ buying up land for a new dam site at Byrrill Creek ‘years and years ago to safeguard our future’.
ludicrous in the extreme at this point in time,’ she said. ‘It’s just not the right thing to do. We’ll have to go through years of work to get it through. Other options have an impact we can mitigate against so why put people of this shire though years of angst? It’s nothing short of madness’.
Doubling the catchment Cr Youngblutt said that with Byrrill Creek dam, ‘we double the catchment’ while Clarrie Hall had only half the catchment and in a dry period you have a better chance to go through it with double the catchment.’ Council’s natural resources director David Oxenham, in response to a question by Cr Katie Milne about laws affecting such a dam, said a new dam would require a greater allocation of water for the environment and that Cr Youngblutt’s argument was ‘negated by the potential for an increase in environmental flow requirements by the state government’.
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Cr Barry Longland said Byrrill Creek dam was ‘the last’ of staff recommendations so he would ‘stick with the experts and put Byrrill Creek last’. Cr Milne said it was best not to have either Byrrill Creek or Clarrie Hall dams as options as both were rich in biodiversity, including threatened species, and would affect a lot of landowners and farmers. She said water savings could easily be achieved by proper demand strategies to avoid such a scenario altogether. ‘The Byrrill Creek option was the worst in the environmental study and people feel strongly for the farmers at Clarrie Hall Dam, and if we can do anything to avoid impacting on their lives, we should,’ she said. Cr Skinner, elected mayor just four weeks ago pledging he wanted to preserve the Tweed’s ‘pristine environment’, started by saying he continued on page 2 VALVOLINE OIL FILTERS Suit popular makes.
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