01/05/2017
For all who are interested this is the reply to the below comments on our page.
Your comments have been read and this is exactly why this Facebook site was set up after your public meeting last Thursday, so that the community could be advised of the complete offerings of this facility and not just your version of what it will be. It is also to see if the community is as outraged as you allege it is. Looking at the amount of negative vs positive comments on this site already, all can come to their own conclusion. In order to alleviate the concerns you have raised that this was somehow a secret application, which it is most definitely not I attended your meeting to put your minds at ease and subsequently establish this page.
Poker Machines, as can be seen by majority of the above comments are enjoyed by many people in the community in a responsible manner and form part of the overall offering of this facility. The application for the 80 machines is the total number that the venue will be licensed for. No one except you has suggested that this amount of machines will be offered from day one. In fact you stated at your meeting that the venue may have “hundreds” in the future which you were corrected by your own expert panel that no one venue of this size in Victoria can have more than 100 machines.
Mr Rice and his family have lived in Beaconsfield and Officer for over 25 years and more specifically, in Officer for the last 5 years. The neighbour you refer to is Mr Dowsett the cofounder of your campaign.
As far as your concerns that Mr Rice hasn’t wanted to explain the venue’s full benefit to the community, he would like to thank you for calling your open town hall meeting last Thursday which he attended and gave a full and more balanced view to those of yours. Which approximately half of the attendees from your own meeting approached Mr Rice afterwards with questions regarding the facility and were able to leave the meeting with a far more accurate view of the true nature of this facility and its community benefit than what you had and still continue to portray.
Under the Officer Precinct Structure Plan zoning, the Education Hub that you refer to is on the Northern side of the Princes Hwy and the venue will be on the Southern side, which is in the Gateway Precinct Zone. Your assertions that the Council and Mr Rice have somehow kept the community in the dark about this zoning are absurd. The Officer PSP has been a publically evolving document for the past 20 years and was fully gazetted, publically documented and advertised and passed by Council and State Government over 5 years ago.
Council Planning regulations require that a building in the gateway precinct zone with Princess Highway frontage must be no less than 3 stories in height or 12.5 meters in built form.
Andrew it is clear that you are very much against poker machines and your voice has been heard as you are one of the only who are using this site for your own self promotion and prejudices. We are sure that all of our followers and future followers will come to their own conclusions as to the objectivity of your comments.
