At the most recent Council meeting in August, a resolution to approve the 2050 Strategy, a paper that defines how Shepparton will develop over the next thirty years, was set aside due to conflicting points of view among the Councillors.
Among the key points was the development of land to the east of Doyles Rd. The Shire of Shepparton along with the City of Shepparton and the Shire of Rodney has expanded over the last 30 years from a population around 50,000 to one that is now included in all of Greater Shepparton, with a population of more than 66,000 people and will expand to 78,000 by 2050. At odds with this growth is the direction physical progress has taken it. Shepparton is now a city that is roughly 14k m north to south yet only 4km east to west. With the river to the west, it can only expand to the east.
Some Councillors pointed out the current growth is not conducive to the centralised plan for the city’s major public education facility.
The Council paper at the meeting is a hodge-podge of ideas that do not fit in with any logical explanation. The argument is that this land is important agricultural land yet the properties themself are not sustainable due in part to their relative size. In order to be so, farms will have to be consolidated. The Council paper says, ‘I agriculture is to be maintained in Shepparton East, it is critical that businesses are able to increase scale, by increasing the size of the farm, switching to higher value horticultural commodities or more intensive production systems such as protected horticulture.’
Yet a paper produced for the Council by Spacial Economics in September 2019 indicates that more critical to the future development of Shepparton is access to suitable Industrial land. Industrial land is in short supply and will reach a critical mass before the 2050 Strategy is reached. It is already at that point with almost no industrial zoned land currently available.
An earlier Agricultural Land Use Options paper conducted for the Council suggests that there is a vision for the land to remain as primary production. The question that is not answered is, whose vision and for what purpose given the need for more industrial land?
For the owners of the crucial land, to sell it as is, in order to consolidate into a larger agricultural holding, it has a value around $25,000 per hectare while land zoned industrial, even as broad acre, would have a value ten times that amount.
The imputation is that small holders should sell off to an ‘agricultural’ consolidator who would then reap the full benefit of an inevitable eventual rezoning to satisfy the demand for accessible industrial land near to the CBD.
With that done, land further east could be developed as residential. The stumbling block is who now owns this wedge of valuable land immediately next to the industrial precinct? They don’t want to sell.
Implied arguments about flood zones and existing irrigation infrastructure do not stack up against current engineering capabilities and the pressing needs of the community in the immediate future. Ideally, this land might be developed as something like a garden industrial that offers a softer transition between the existing heavy industry on the west side of Doyles Rd and future residential development further east.
As it stands, the Council gives the appearance it is playing games with the current landholders, some whom have been there for decades, keen to sell yet not forego the loss that they incur would if it is sold off under the current agricultural zoning. There are suggestions that there are other influencing factors at play that are currently not being put on the table.
