Pittwater Life January 2017 Issue

Simple plan for the future
News
MP Rob Stokes talks to Lisa Offord about recent local health and community developments.
The flurry of major announcements
in late 2016
will see Pittwater enter exciting
times, says local MP Rob Stokes.
And he has a simple message
to community members
concerned about change: to
preserve the essence of Pittwater
there needs to be some
“give and take”.
With passionate interest
in environmental land use,
planning heritage and sustainability,
Mr Stokes bubbles
with enthusiasm about the
announcement of the new community
at Ingleside.
“I talked about Ingleside in
my maiden speech – it is an
opportunity for us to get things
right on the beaches,” he said.
With up to 3,400 houses and
terraces to be built on 15 hectares
of open space and a further
200 hectares of preserved
bushland, the suburb will set
unprecedented standards for
sustainability, Mr Stokes said.
Draft plans, which include
proposals for electric vehicle
recharging points and LED
street lighting, also feature a
town centre, a neighbourhood
centre, a primary school and
other community facilities.
Mr Stokes said the land
would be developed with environmental
protection levels
higher than ever seen before in
Sydney.
“We want Ingleside to be a
lighthouse development for
sustainability and we are going
to investigate how we can actually
make that work.”
He said there were several
key restraints planners needed
to observe.
“All the water ends up in the
Narrabeen Lagoon catchment
so we need to be careful about
how we manage riparian corridors
and water flow,” he said.
The new expanded suburb
would also be car dependant.
“We have to work out how we
enable electric vehicles (EVs)
and embed that technology
from the very beginning but
also how we encourage people
to use public transport, rather
than their car.
“We are upgrading Mona Vale
Road... we don’t want to fill it
with cars alone – but also with
new buses between Mona Vale
and Macquarie Park,” he said.
Mr Stokes said the challenge
would be keeping a lid on costs
of building the foundations of
a sustainable community.
“You want to get as many of
the sustainability outcomes as
possible, but that puts upward
pressure on house prices and
you don’t want it to be an unaffordable
community either.”
It’s expected the Ingleside development
will be two decades
in the making.
“It is going to take time… it
is calibrated with Mona Vale
Road, which in itself is going to
take a few years,” he said.
(The $90 million upgrade
and widening of Mona Vale
Road between Mona Vale and
Ingleside is expected to be
finished by 2020.)
Mona Vale Hospital
The Mona Vale Hospital precinct
will continue to grow,
with registrations of interest
sought from health care
providers to offer services to
complement those already
delivered or in planning.
Mr Stokes said to make better
use of the land and “protect it
from any short-term decisions
by future governments”, the vision
was for a series of modern
sub-acute health facilities to
be built around a central park
where the current main building
stands.
He said there was a real
opportunity to better link the
future services that can be
offered at the hospital with
the community – which is why
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JANUARY 2017