Hornsby Shire Council have lost their funding for the contentious regional sporting venue at Westleigh Park.
Despite repeated calls for the project to respond to the constraints of the site such as:
- Traffic bottlenecks
- Critically Endangered Forest
- Lack of funding for a regional sporting venue
- Close proximity to a National Park and bushfire prone land
- Critical infrastructure – a dam supplying the area’s drinking water
- Significant asbestos and soil contamination including PFAS
Council refused to listen to the calls of the community to scale back the project. Now the Labor government have scaled it back for them.
Save Westleigh Park ask Council to give the project a fresh start with priority given to:
- Properly remediating all of the toxic soil and asbestos contamination now.
- Put the mountain bike tracks on the cleared area.
- Create water sensitive urban design where the rain soaks into the landscape. Impervious services such as artificial turf and hard roads direct huge torrents of water into the creek lines and are already flooding housing at the lower end of the catchment. This will only get worse with more intense development and climate change.
- Protect the Aboriginal cultural heritage – don’t cut down the Aboriginal scar tree and move mountain bike tracks away from the rock shelter.
- Keep walking tracks in the forested areas instead of preventing walkers from using all but 170m of walking trail, when mountain bike trails were to be 7km.The endangered forest and threatened species shouldn’t only be available to mountain bikers speeding by.
- Avoid any impact to the Dog Pound Creek biobanking site – increased traffic along the riverine areas is a threat to Powerful Owls who use the area for nesting and roosting.
- Save the forest for those that want to enjoy one of the most amazing plant communities left in Sydney.
- Save the forest for the wildlife that it supports.
- Save the forest for those who want to tread lightly on the earth.