(transcript)
Developers'
Issues
Richard
Wood
I
suspect I may come up with a few issues that the previous panel
might actually find some disagreement in.
I
want to break this down into five different areas, challenges
that we experience through the development process.
The
first one is in the planning phase or the planning and design
phase of tree selection on tree selection there is the constant
battle and argument between natives and exotics and Landcom
I must say, over the past 5-6 years has been leading the way
in the development industry on issues of sustainability, but
where the waters become a little bit muddied when it comes
to tree selection is in understanding exactly what sustainability
is and its not speaking just about environmental sustainability
we do have to consider such issues as the social sustainability
and also economic sustainability, cost issues, and I will run
through that in a minute.
Creating
an impression, the big bold entry statement, developers love
these because they create a sense of place in an urgent fashion
and they certainly add to the possibility of kick starting
a development. But if you are going to do that you have to
protect your investment and it is an investment from a developers
point of view there is big dollars involved in getting trees
established and if you don’t protect it you may have
to go back and replace it, maybe once, twice, multiple times.
Management
and maintenance, there is particularly on the maintenance side
once landscaping contracts are completed like all construction
contracts there is a twelve month maintenance period. I am
going to go through a couple of issues why twelve months perhaps
just isn’t enough and then we’ll go through some
lessons learnt at Victoria Park. So for those of you not familiar
with the development Victoria Park is a 25 hectare development
in Green Square in South Sydney it is about ten minutes from
the Sydney CBD and about the same from this venue. Forty percent
of the entire site we have dedicated to public domain so, parks
footpaths, roads, centre median swales. Down on the left hand
edge of the site is a magnificent row of local heritage listed
Fig Trees which we have been able to incorporate into the development
those trees were planted approximately one hundred years ago
at about the same time that the site was converted from what
was once a part of Waterloo Swamp into Victoria Park Racecourse.
As
part of the development we propose to be planting over a thousand
new trees the majority of those will be native species. To
put what I am about to present to you in context I perhaps
need to go a bit broader on the history of the site as I said
it was once part of Waterloo Swamp up until about the 1800s
and then a fellow by the name of James Joynton-Smith filled
in the swamp and built the racecourse. It’s had a number
of uses over the years it was at one time the former Leyland
Factory, it has been a Department of Defence storage site and
Landcom purchased the site in 1997. We set about in the public
domain scheme attempting to re-create the swamp heritage or
the acquifer heritage of the site we still have a very high
water table there a very strong acquifer running through the
site. A number of the species such as the Melaleucas which
were chosen for the site run through the, there is a large
park in the middle and they are spread out through that park,
to give the impression of re-creating that scene. I’m
going to come back and touch upon that because if you think
about what I have just said that it was once a swamp and we
have tried to re-create it, the fact is, it is not a swamp
now so there is tree management issues that arise out of that.
Refer
to Slide No. 4 Title: Tree Selection Tree selection, I spoke
about the sustainability although there has been a constant
push for more natives and less exotics, which we would support,
we also need to be mindful of sometimes natives just don’t
like the environment that you are trying to put them into.
You see on the left hand side there all through the development
the street tree plantings are either, on the major routes through
the development, they are either Eucalyptus saligna or citriodora.
You can see from the setting that they have been placed into
its, this particular shot I love because we have planted a
tree above a stormwater pit and covered it in various types
of stone. Now, I grew up in a community near the Murray River
and I never saw trees growing like that, where as you see on
the right hand side some of the Melaleucas which are in the
bushland re-creation setting, that’s more of a natural
setting however that type of tree drinks a lot of water and
in times of drought you are ploughing a lot of water into keeping
those trees alive. Now, fortunately we don’t use potable
water at Victoria Park we have a bore water system but still
we would like to be able to put that water into more sustainable
trees. The other issue with planting Eucalypts as street trees
is that they drop limbs and that tree that you see there is
going to get a heck of a lot bigger than that and one day it
is going to start dropping rather large limbs that could eventually
be a public liability issue for Council if a large limb is
dropped on somebody’s car or worse still somebody’s
head.
Spacing
size and orientation of trees that you put in is also very
important, we typically like to keep the trees at Victoria
Park at least five to seven metres apart but there are some
instances where we have got citriodoras three metres apart
planted in pairs, it is going to become a very intense and
dense canopy. But also orientation, it is quite odd when, I
have been at Victoria Park for 3 years now, I haven’t
been there from inception but one of the first things that
struck me was that we have Eucalypts planted on all the east-west
streets and we have Chinese Elms planted on all the north-south
streets so the streets where you actually want some foliage
all year round you don’t have it and on the streets with
a northern orientation they have constant shade through winter,
so we need to think a bit more clearly about where we plant
trees.
Refer
to Slide No. 5 Title: Creating an Impression This is one of
the central median swales that we have at Victoria Park and
right next to our project and sales office. It is an entry
statement and it is a way as I said developers love doing it
because it kick starts the development people come in, we are
selling product, people want to see the environment that they
are buying into equally as to the type of apartment or townhouse
that they are buying. This is the place to introduce size through
the rest of the development a number of landscape contractors
have queried our insistence on 100 and 200 Litre pot sizes
for the Eucalypts going in, now, our hands are tied behind
our back there because that’s a condition on our development
consent placed on us by Council but a number of the Contractors
have said to us that they have conducted tests where they have
taken a sapling and placed it next to a 100 Litre pot and within
three years the sapling had overtaken it. And it is also an
issue taking that 100 Litre pot which has been established
in that environment for some time and putting it in a completely
new environment and one that it may not like. With entry statements
they are great for the sales process but you shouldn’t
over do it. If you carry that through the rest of the development,
ahead of the builders, they may not necessarily place the same
value on that tree and its long term survival as the developer
does, the landscape architect does, and the Council do. This
is where it becomes a cost imperative it doesn’t matter
what sort of protection you put around these trees they’ll
find a way, they will always get damaged, it ruins the impression
that you are trying to give of that impression the outset of
the development that you’ve fought so hard and spend
so much money on establishing. What we did at Victoria Park
to try and avoid exactly this sort of thing was that we thought
we had outsmarted the builders the only place that we put trees
in early was in our entry statement, the central median swales,
which as you can see they outsmarted us, and the parks we left
all of the tree plantings around the buildings until after
the buildings had been completed.
Management
and maintenance issues. Maintenance periods, how long? I mentioned
the twelve month period which is typical. At Victoria Park
we are maintaining all of the public domain areas including
all of the street tree plantings and the park tree plantings
until 2009 and we are doing this for two reasons. One reason,
quite unashamedly, we can control the appearance of the project
and that helps our sales, no question about that. The other
reason is parts of the project had been handed over to Council
previously and Council’s maintenance regime was not as
rigid as ours and certain areas of the project and a number
of the trees died and simply weren’t replaced and that
was ruining the impression that we were working so hard to
create. When you do get to the end of a maintenance period
though you have got the issue of handover, now it’s quite
interesting that when you go through a DA process you will
have your landscape architect, you will be in discussion with
Council planners, Council’s landscape architect, you
never see anyone from the maintenance department and I sometimes
wonder if when you lodge a DA with a Council that does anybody
in the planning department actually show the landscape plan
to the maintenance department and say have you got the budget
to cope with this, because invariably they don’t.
So
that’s where our short term strategies of creating instant
impact, instant impressions and short term maintenance and
then handover to Council can defeat the long term goals. I
suppose this is one for both the development industry and also
local government to work on what does it actually cost and
how far can Council go in maintaining these public domain areas.
So
when it comes down to cost it is very difficult to budget for
the unknown you can always put in a contingency five percent,
ten percent in the extreme but if you don’t know up front
that your maintenance period is going to by management decision
extend for another five years and you haven’t allowed
for that in your upfront budget other things have to be cut
out of the project. So some lessons learnt from Victoria Park,
tree selection, native species are not always the best for
a particular environment, a point on that, out of probably
about six hundred plantings that we have put in so far probably
about two thirds of those have been natives one third exotics
we haven’t lost one exotic so far through natural causes
but our loss rate on exotics and my personal opinion I put
this down to the environment in which they have predominantly
been planted our loss rate on those is about five to ten percent
and in some cases it’s constant. And bigger is not always
better I know Council’s would prefer to have the largest
tree possible planted but that may not be the strongest tree
in that position. Creating an impression be selective and protect
it, also choose the right tree to create that impression but
where possible make sure you plant after the builders have
moved through. One thing that we have certainly learnt from
our experiences at Victoria Park is that if we ever do centre
median swales again we won’t touch them, we will certainly
form them but we won’t plant anything until the builders
are long gone. And management and maintenance make sure that
the long term maintenance budget equates with the short term
goal.
QUESTIONS
Greg
Moore – Melbourne University
Whilst I took some joy from your comments Richard there were a number
of things that really worried me in your presentation. The first was
the assertion that natives will shed large limbs, I certainly challenge
that and I’d ask you to provide the data because I don’t
necessarily believe that is the case. The second point that I’d
like to ask or make is I wonder about cause and effect if you manage
trees in a particular way then shedding is likely to be an outcome
and some of the stuff we saw in your slides even suggested that compaction
of root systems and the like is going to cause trouble and the other
thing I would say is that attitudes of the workers and of your contractors
can be picked up from the management and so for example I would ask
in your comments about exotic losses vs native losses did your exotics
cost you more per plant than your natives, what’s the attitude
of the people around in terms of managing the natives, one of my experiences
is that people will manage an exotic virtually to the enth degree but
a native is a native and it can look after itself and as a consequence
you’re certainly not comparing apples with apples. And the last
thing I would say is that we’ve gained a great deal of knowledge
about the management of these development sites the protection and
the like and it seems to me that it’s not just our responsibility
to make that knowledge known it should be the developers responsibility
to pick some of this up and incorporate it. I look forward to seeing
your paper and I’ll certainly have a really good look at the
data but there were a number of things you said that worry me.
Richard
Wood’s Answer
I welcome those comments if I wanted to hide certain aspects of the
development I didn’t have to show that slide of the damage to
the trees. I think, and as I have said, Landcom has certainly learnt
a lot from this development. In terms of questions about data on limbs
I can only go on my own anecdotal evidence of the trees that I see
every day at work and we are already picking up limbs that fall from
those trees, it’s a fact, it happens. Forgot some of the other
questions but in terms of management we do try to manage contractors
but it is a very difficult job and most of the contractors we work
with are very decent people and very decent companies and they try
very hard as well. Yes attitudes can be learnt from management but
we’ve worked, we have a much better system that particular shot
that I showed you was taken some four years ago, we haven’t had
those issues since because we’ve learnt from those experiences
and we’ve educated the contractors that we have on site.
Alistair
Hay
I think that one thing this demonstrates is the need to involve developers
in this process that we’re undertaking now and it also demonstrates
very clearly I think that we need principles and guidelines that effect
trees in all stages of their lifecycle. It is tempting to focus on
aging trees and so on but clearly some support is needed as well as
perhaps desk thumping about this issue to developers about how to manage
trees from the beginning.
John
Douglas – Ryde TAFE
Just further in relation to Dr Greg Moore’s point both those
species Eucalyptus saligna and Eucalyptus citriodora, I think what
happens there is that they suffer from a generalisation that has developed
where people tend to think that because we get a proportion of each
of those species perhaps five percent that do drop limbs and have some
sort of genetic defect where from an early age they will drop limbs
and those trees indeed should be deemed dangerous and should be replaced
its been generalised across the entire species that this is a characteristic
of those and I think to some extent through the teaching we have to
take some responsibility for it but we want to try and change that
understanding because the majority of both those species live on particularly
through the first two thirds of their lifecycle in very strong condition
and retaining their limbs in the face of very difficult forces. On
just a second point in relation to small trees doing better than large
trees this is a logical and realistic historical perspective that we
do now have a NATSPEC guide which governs the development, the nursery
style development of trees, and if trees are chosen from people who
adhere to these guidelines and selected well it is possible to get
large trees that will grow on with very little transplant shock and
grow on to be very good specimens into the future. And on the third
point in relation to the tree protection whether it be for the young
trees or probably more importantly for the trees that are older that
are to be retained on the site often there are clear guidelines laid
down in the development application, clear conditions of consent and
they’re not adhered to by the builders and there is insufficient
policing of those probably there is insufficient resources provided
by the consent authority to actually follow through and see if this
is done. But I certainly agree with Dr Greg Moore that the developers
should be taking more responsibility in that respect and it is in fact
in their interest to do so to get the good product in the end for everybody.
Richard
Wood’s Answer
Just in response to that, without fear of attempting to overly defend
our actions or what some people may see in action, we have learnt from
those early experiences and we haven’t had those same problems
again but I do agree with you that when you have on a development site
such as this one not just one builder or one contractor you have a
multiple of them we don't have a policing role or a policing power
we rely upon local government to assist us in ensuring that the DA
conditions that local government place on building applications are
adhered to and it is a very infrequent sighting of a Council Ranger
unless they get a call from a nearby resident of works going beyond
the allocated time. These sorts of issues of asset maintenance and
protection are not well policed.
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