By Chris Thomson | posted on May 17, 2018
TORTUOUS negotiations – including on a safe entry point and a $9000 piece of public art – continue over a fuel station planned for near the Chester Pass roundabout, despite a building permit having been issued for the contentious project.
City of Albany chief planner Paul Camins told The Weekender a building application was approved for the Albany Highway site in April.
He said the permit was valid for two years, and if the proponent, Peter D. Webb & Associates town planners, wished to extend it a standard application process would apply.
In August, the State Administrative Tribunal overturned the City’s February 2017 refusal of a development application for the project.
In her conditions of approval, Tribunal member Rosetta Petrucci ordered that access points and stormwater management to the highway be designed to the specification of Main Roads Western Australia.
Main Roads Great Southern regional manager Andrew Duffield said such a requirement was standard, and in “99.99 per cent of the cases never an issue”.
“This one’s been topical from Day 1,” he said.
“We have just been wanting to work with [the proponent] over safe access to the site and it’s taken quite some time to get them to the table.
“It’s very clear there’s a whole range of other things they need to get approval and endorsement of.”
Mr Duffield said stormwater was one.
“If they’re looking to tap into our network, then we need to know about it and we need to give approval of it,” he said.
He explained that drawings submitted with the development application were site layout plans only that “did not give any particular engineering detail”.
He said that for projects abutting a main road it was perfectly normal for discussions to ensue on technical details such as the type of paving, and a traffic management plan for the construction phase.
“It’s not as simple as: ‘SAT has given us approval, we can do whatever we want’,” he said.
Mr Duffield said he sat down with the proponent on May 7 to help improve the project’s on-site traffic circulation, which would lead to fewer cars backing up out onto the highway.
The planned exit on to Albany Highway is about five car lengths from the entrance to the roundabout, the worst intersection in regional WA in terms of frequency and cost of crashes.
“I hope [the proponent] come[s] back to us fairly quickly with their modifications, and if things are looking okay we’ll tick it off, and away they’ll go,” Mr Duffield said.
He said Main Roads was dealing with Peter D. Webb & Associates on “a number of other” projects in Perth.
“We’re very happy to see development, but there are some sites that are more challenging than others,” he said.
“Whilst [a fuel station] might be allowed under that zoning, so were a number of other options which had a lower traffic generation [and] traffic impact capacity.
“For example, a showroom would have been within those zonings and we would have been much happier with a showroom than a high traffic generating site.”
Mr Duffield said road safety was his paramount concern.
Ms Petrucci also ordered the developer to either erect a piece of public art worth 0.5 per cent of the $1.8 million project cost, or contribute 0.3 per cent of the project cost if additional landscape and building treatments were proposed to the satisfaction of the City.
Mr Camins said Peter D. Webb & Associates was yet to advise if art, or the extra landscaping and building work, would be chosen.
The company’s Managing Director, Nik Hidding, said his “client” had instructed him not to comment to the media.
The owner of the site is Victorian-based Procon Developments, which has arranged for at least two Coles Express and one BP servo to be built in WA.
