Plans for a new, 11-strong apartment building in Sandy Bay have been approved by the Hobart City Council.
All but one member of the council planning committee gave the proposal the green light at a meeting on Wednesday night.
Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds voted against the project after raising concerns about the scale of the apartments and modifications to the site that would see a rivulet altered.
“Nine apartments at three levels probably would have been a more appropriate scale for the site,” Lord Mayor Reynolds said.
“I’m really not happy about building right up to the top of the bank of any rivulet or any water way in 2023.”
“It just makes it really difficult to support this.”
Reynolds said she doesn’t feel like she has received “adequate briefing” on what a private owner modifying the rivulet will mean for “downstream properties and basically public waterways”.
“Unless I had some better understanding of that and how that came up and whether that was modelled independently or whether that was done by a consultant paid for [by] the developer, all of that just makes it you know, difficult.”
“I think our rivulets, we do have to be a bit careful with them.”
Reynolds suggested deferring the approval of the project and giving the developers time to come up with a “slightly setback, slightly less, maybe the apartments not being as big” proposal.
“Density of 14 is one thing but there’s a lot of space in these apartments, like they’re very, very large, which is again, I understand the reasons for that, but is this the right place for this scale of development so close to a rivulet?”
“I won’t be supporting it tonight.”
Despite the Lord Mayor’s concerns, Simon Behrakis, John Kelly, Ben Lohberger, Ryan Posselt, Mike Dutta and Bill Harvey all voted in favour of the new apartments.
Once completed, the project will see the current ‘urban weedscape’ at 47 Maning Avenue into ‘lush, leafy apartments’.
Two three story high buildings, each comprising of nine three-bedroom and two two-bedroom units, will be built on the 4649 square metre area.
Both will include an enclosed garage on the ground floor, with two spaces for each apartment.
The vacant, degraded site is currently an ‘overgrown mess’ and is home to a variety of introduced vegetation and ecological issues.
The Council say ‘substantial remediation works’ will be carried out on the rivulet that runs through the property as part of the $15 million build.
