RESPONSE AND COUNTER RESPONSE TO DEPT PLANNING RE AQUIS From: - TopicsExpress

RESPONSE AND COUNTER RESPONSE TO DEPT PLANNING RE AQUIS From: Geoff Holland [mailto:geoffholland007@gmail] Sent: Tuesday, 24 June 2014 1:40 PM To: Aquis Resort GBR Cc: cairns-coev@yahoogroups; transitiontowns-cairns Subject: Re submissions in response to Aquis EIS [email protected] Coordinator General Dear Madam / Sir, I would like to make a submission in response to the Aquis EIS. I note that the period for public comment is open from 28 June to 05 August - just 5.5 weeks to analyse a document with 27 Chapters and 23 Appendices. Are you serious? I request that the period for Community Consultation be extended to 30 Nov 2014. If Flanagan Consulting can take 9 months to construct the EIS, then the Community should be given at least 5 months to deconstruct it. While Pat Flanagan may be being paid $400 per hour to write the EIS, we are being paid nothing and also have jobs and families to attend to! To get an electronic copy of the EIS you ask me to request it from Flanagan Consulting. Although you have it on your website, it is broken up into 50 segments which would require me to download 50 separate documents. I do not wish to go to Flanagan Consulting to obtain a copy. You are the government responsible for the Community Consultation process so it is your responsibility to make all relevant documents available on your website in a manageable form (ie both as a single document AND downloadable as Chapters). Please make the entire EIS available in one or two documents on your website. Sincerely, Geoff Holland On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Aquis Resort GBR wrote: Dear Mr Holland Thank you for your enquiry. The Coordinator-General routinely publicly notifies environmental impact statements for 6 weeks. In this instance the Coordinator-General does not intend to extend the public consultation period for the environmental impact statement. If you can provide your postal address, we can send you a copy of the EIS on a USB drive. Regards Project Manager Aquis Resort GBR Tue 01 June 2014 Aquis Project Manager AQUIS EIS Assessment Office of the Qld Coordinator General Qld. Dept. State Development, Infrastructure and Planning Dear Project Manager, Thankyou for your response. My postal address is Geoff Holland 48 Marshall St Machans Beach Qld 4878 I seriously suggest you review of your 6 week response window for the public to respond to an EIS of this magnitude because currently it appears you are disingenuous about real community consultation. Please forward this advice to the Coordinator General. I am sure your department requires much more than 6 weeks to assess the EIS, and you have a team of full-time professionals! Do you also have a document containing guidelines on how to respond to an EIS? For example, I presume general arguments such as inappropriate scale of the project, and the degree to which tax-payers will have to subsidise this project in terms of funding significant public infrastructure works, would be regarded as irrelevant and would be discounted. And in fact, responses need to refer to specific points in the EIS in a technical fashion. You would therefore have a responsibility to convey this to the community and provide guidelines so as not to waste a lot of peoples time. I have searched for such guidelines on your website and was unable to find any. I look forward to the Aquis EIS on USB as well as guidelines on how people should respond to an EIS, which I will be happy to forward to people I know who are keen to make a submission. Thankyou, Sincerely, Geoff Holland 0499 658 764