Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Two skins of poly for the greenhouse bit and piggery fabric for the ft bit.

Ok so when are you starting

Waiting on a few legal things and council

hopefully your council is quicker than mine.

Well they seem very supporttive but you never know until the piece of paper is in your hand.

How are things going Stuart? Any updates?

We signed company documents on Saturday.

Planning in progress. As in council application.

Just in case people think that I'm all talk.....

I've been hoping to have an anouncement about us starting construction and I almost posted one the other day but it is just as well I didn't.

Found out today that despite personal assurances that it was all sorted (from the assistant regional director of Vicroads) that it is not and we still don't have a planning permit we can use.

We have been absolutely pulling our hair in frustration dealing with the bureaucracy.

We are not without hope as our MP was in the meeting with Vicroads so we will see what he says about this reversal. Also we have told the Business Developemtn Manager at the council that if they want us to go ahead then they need to sort the problem out. Apparently we are not the only business to be effected two others have been hit with the same conditions, as would any other new ventures and indeed would any existing operations if they wanted to expand or change their operations. In practice their is a massive break on any business development the way the planning scheme is being interpreted. Given that almost no development is possible with the current interpretation I am hopeful that the interpretation will be changed.

I say hopeful but I'm not expectant.

good luck mate, i hate the planning people, it seems all they want to do is stop people rather than help them, i hope you get the go ahead soon

Yeah so do I.

Just curious Stuart... what has VicRoads got to do with the planning application??

Cos they probley want to put a set of traffic lights so the trucks can turn in to pick up all the fish and produce this thing is going to produce
Sorry had a few to many drinks and am beeing silly

Unfortunately you are not being that silly.

They are insisting that we construct full left and right turning lanes for entry and exit to the site.

We dropped the farm shop from the proposal and we were told that we would only need to build a reduced left turning lane. Yesterday we were told that no the original conditions stand.

To widen the road and associated earth works we have been told is in the order of 80-90k. To remove the trees around 60k. Engineering, design and compliance brings it up to a total of 200k but we have been warned that we could go past that.

Oh and we need to apply to vicroads for permission to do work on the road easement and get a 2nd planning permit to do the road works. Which we have been told we would not get because of the extent and size of the trees to be removed. The full left turning lane means taking out three massive manna gums where as the reduced one would have missed them all.

scale it down and submit brand new plans without the shop, plans that would not require roadwork. sometimes getting old plans changed is more difficult than getting new plans approved.

Been there tried that. The agreement we had from vicroads was we drop the farm shop so that the only traffic we would have was employees, supplies in and produce out and then there was no need fire the right tuning lane. Yesterday we were told that any business would require the left and right turning lanes.

By any business I mean any business. If the farmer wanted to build a new hay shed and the planing permit got referred to vicroads then the farmer would need to construct left and right turning lanes.