Residents blame developer for lack of maintenance despite wet weather
By Kirra Livingstone
RESIDENTS of Hedge Road, Glass House Mountains are growing frustrated by the lack of garden maintenance on a parcel of land, which they say is the developer of a recently built estate’s responsibility.
However, the developer, Marty Smith, said he has struggled to keep up with the Sunshine Coast Council’s regulations and upkeep.
Glass House Mountains resident, Scott Wilson, who lives around the corner from the land, said it was extremely important for the land to be maintained appropriately.
He said it hadn’t been mowed in at least a year.
“It’s just so overgrown, the last time when it was mowed back in June last year, we ended up with snakes in the house,” Mr Wilson said.
“With young kids walking around the neighbourhood, you worry about them walking in there and either hurting themselves or getting bitten.
The general look of it just looks atrocious, neighbours are mowing it and everyone’s sick of it.”
A Sunshine Coast Council spokesperson said the drainage reserve is the developer’s responsibility to maintain for three years before ownership is handed over to council.
“As outlined in the development approval, Lots 6 and 2 on Hedge Road comprise a bushland park and drainage reserve under Council’s ownership,” they said.
“However, as a condition of their approval, the developer must rehabilitate and landscape the lots with a maintenance period of approximately three years to allow the plants to establish.
Once the planting has established, then Council takes over the responsibility to maintain these lots.”
The spokesperson added that they were working with the developer “to achieve satisfactory compliance of their approval and regularly requests the developer to maintain the site.”
Mr Smith said he has received the rough end of the stick from council and other agencies.
He bought the development in 2022, after stage one had already been built, and said initially the development approval only needed approximately 1200 trees at the site.
After he had budgeted the cost of the trees, at the last minute, he claims council informed him he was required to plant 7200 trees.
To avoid further delays to homeowners who were waiting for their houses to be built in the estate, Mr Smith agreed to this requirement.
Mr Smith said between all the additional trees they’ve had to plant, while maintaining the grass during three years of wet weather, he admitted it’s been hard to keep up with maintenance.
“Adding these extra trees and plants has probably cost us seven times more than originally budgeted, seven times more upkeep and seven times more labour to put in,” he said.
“Obviously there’s money in this but you have to allocate costings for different areas for the construction and maintenance phases to make it slightly profitable, and we’ve copped hits all the way through.
We could have maximized our yield and applied to resize the blocks into 400 sq metres, but chose to keep the quality in the area to suit the owner occupier and the surround estates.”
Mr Smith said they are now planning to cut the grass down as much as possible, the weeds and long grass have been poisoned and will be returning within the next few weeks as another 4200 plants are still required.
He added he had been in conversation with the neighbours who have been mowing the footpath area only, which they said they didn’t mind doing.
kirra@gcnews.com.au
