Sports Facility Development Plan (10 years) - Brimbank City Council

Sports facility distributionThe distribution of sporting facility provision varies markedly across areas of themunicipality, with patterns of distribution linked closely to the era when suburbanareas were developed(REFER TO FIGURE 8 – DISTRIBUTION OF SPORTS FACILITIES).Brimbank SouthThe older Brimbank suburbs, which are concentrated in the southern half of themunicipality in the districts of Sunshine and Deer Park, have a reasonably gooddistribution of small, single field sporting reserves. Generally, there is one sportingreserve located within each large neighbourhood precinct within the Sunshinedistrict (Refer to Figure 6) and the Deer Park district (Refer to Figure 5).As a result, residents within these areas can comfortably walk to local sportingreserves, with most households located within a 500m radius of a reserve. Themajority of these single pitch sporting reserves currently or will soon haveunrestricted public access, with changes proposed to those reserves which haveexclusionary perimeter fencing that may prevent local residents from accessing aground. Therefore, spaces for informal sporting activities are locally accessible.These types of facilities are ideal for community groups and small clubs to providelocal recreation opportunities. There is also particular interest for the use of singlefield sites from local cultural groups wishing to play informal games and casuallyuse fields for development purposes.However, many of the reserves are allocated to sporting clubs that use them mostweekday evenings and all weekend. Therefore:It is difficult for local community groups to access the reserves at night or onweekends for a casual and informal use.They are often surrounded with high fences and are therefore uninviting for casualusers.General public and school access to the reserves is limited to weekday morningsand early afternoons.Other concerns with single field facilities are that they:do not easily accommodate club growth or the expansion of facilitiescan be problematic for nearby surrounding residents in terms of noise and intrusioninto the residential area of balls and spectatorsdo not generate economies of scale through the optimal use of pavilions andassociated facilitiesSPORTS FACILITY DEVELOPMENT PLAN37