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2002 (c) Peninsula Community Access Newspaper Inc

 

Community comment needed on heritage properties

 

Over the last few years, the Environmental Heritage Committee of Gosford Council has been reviewing a list of prospective "heritage items" of the City.

The places include houses, shops, churches, wharves and sculptures.

Heritage consultants from outside the City were employed to help assess the items and the property owners were contracted and asked to comment.

The Heritage Committee then recommended to Council that the places assessed as having heritage value be put into a Draft LEP for public exhibition and comment, with a view to adding them to the City's heritage list subject to the submissions received from the community as well as the owners and occupiers.

On August 6, Gosford Council resolved to prepare a Draft LEP but only for those properties where there had been no objection from the owners when recently contacted.

Many places assessed as having important historic and social significance will thus be excluded from the Draft LEP and the community will have no opportunity to comment.

These places include Rose Cottage at Bensville, the Wagstaffe store, 55 Hills St Gosford (Maddocks), George Frost's House at Kincumber, "Set-tree" at Davistown and the Avoca Theatre.

There are many others.

The places excluded from the Draft LEP will be scrutinised by councillors at a strategy-policy Forum (a quasi-confidential Committee of Council) sometime in the future, to determine whether they should go into a separate Draft LEP.

There may never be an opportunity for the community to comment on what must be assumed to be our most vulnerable ("at risk") heritage places.

The term "heritage item" is usually applied to places on a "heritage list" in a planning instrument, but a planning instrument doesn't give places heritage value - it simply (and importantly) helps to preserve that value.

If the limited heritage of the Central Coast is not to be lost entirely during the 21st century, environmental education programs will have to give increased attention to the "built" environment as it relates to places we need to keep.

Beryl Strom, Killcare