The school site was originally three parcels of land: the Police pound and Sergeant’s residence in the middle, the School of Arts site taken over by the school when it moved to the site, and a very unsuccessful subdivision on muddy flats to the south.
The subdivision was first of three lots in earliest days, then later a subdivision of seven lots with a road.
You can see this on early Parish maps.
When the school took over it consolidated the entire site.
In recent years, Doma and CCRDC approached Council to subdivide the boundary between the School of Arts and the police paddock, by extending the boundary further south to arrange for a doubling of the size of this block.
I can’t speak to the issue of why the original site boundaries were reinvoked in this case and not the original subdivision boundary to the south.
There were issues around how the private road was to be treated, and whether the bottom edge of the Leagues Club Park Crown Land site was part absorbed into the redrawn boundaries for the reopening of lower Baker St.
The road along the subdivision area had never been a formed road, rather a narrower dirt track.
The seven subdivisions were never successfully sold due to the land being not really suitable.
If Crown Land is to be affected, there would be specific provisions for how this should proceed, but they do not appear to have been embodied in current CCRDC documents and plans for the site, nor in Council mapping.
I understand that apart from the Doma extended site, the State Government proposed to sell the rest of the site as a whole.
But in the first articulation of plans for the school site, the Performing Arts Centre was to be built on the far end.
In the proposal, concept design only we are told, in the second iteration of CCRDC proposals, (which ignored questions of Crown Land title as well), the south of the site was allocated for a top-class hotel (displacing the PAC) and the Crown Land across Vaughan Rd for a conference centre, the PAC to go on the Crown Land of Poppy Park.
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Mar 13, 2016
Kay Williams, Pearl Beach