Dear Resident,
In order to keep you and our community, up to date with the Hub project, here are recent activities of Support Lindfield and the Council around the project. There has been some activity!

1. Support Lindfield’s letter to Councillors and Councillor Ngai’s response
On 25 May we wrote to all Councillors as we had major concerns about the apparent lack of progress by Council Officers following the closure of the Request for Tender process on 3 April. We had asked a senior Council Officer when the successful tenderer would be announced, and the response was that there was “no date to report to Council”. As we believed this was not an acceptable response, we wrote to all Councillors requesting a response from each one of them. The letter is at this link. It is long on purpose as we wanted to remind Councillors of the facts of the history of the project and the delays since its inception in 2012. About two weeks later (after thundering silence) we sent a reminder that we were awaiting a response.

The only written response we received was from Councillor Sam Ngai who is one of our two Roseville Ward Councillors. The Mayor, Jennifer Anderson, who is our other Ward Councillor did not acknowledge nor respond to our letter. Councillors Cedric Spencer (Wahroonga) and Peter Kelly (Gordon), acknowledged our letter. Councillor Ngai’s response is at this link. We thank Cr. Ngai for his response and for his continuing work on behalf of the community.

2. Council Officers’ report to Council meeting on 30 June
On 17 June a report was posted on the Council website headed Lindfield Village Hub Tender Update. That report was tabled at the Council meeting Tuesday 30 June. Councillors voted unanimously to approve the report. The recommendation from the Council Officers was that:
- Council decline to accept any tenders received. (There were two tenders, one from Fabcot (Woolworths) and the other from Aqualand.)
- Delegate authority to the General Manager to enter into negotiations with any possible providers (including Fabcot and Aqualand) over no more than a three month period and report the outcomes of those negotiations to Council by no later than October 2020.
The full report is at this link.

3. Support Lindfield meeting with General Manager and other senior Council Officers
In the meantime, we requested a meeting with Council’s General Manager, John McKee, in an effort to get some information about the project. Since Council prevented the developers from communicating with the community, we have been unable to get information from either them or Council for some time. Even submitting GIPA (Freedom of Information) requests result in being denied information we believe should be available to the community and we have to pursue those through the State Government which is a slow process.

On 23 June, four of our Committee members had a meeting with John McKee, General Manager; Geoff Douglas, Head of Major Projects; David Marshall, Director Corporate and Virginia Leafe, Manager Communications. We had a constructive and open discussion around topics and questions we had submitted beforehand. The General Manager agreed to deal with one our concerns around the lack of transparency with the community. We will report his response in a future update.

4. Our reach in the community soars to 10,000!
We now have an estimated reach of 10,000 individuals in the Roseville Ward. The population of the Ward is around 25,000 so our reach represents about 40%. We think that’s pretty good but of course we would like to have direct communication with many more residents.

We depend on you in the community to spread the word to your neighbours and local friends in Roseville, Lindfield, Killara and other suburbs further north . Please pass this message on to them. And if you received this message from someone else please go to this page https://supportlindfield.net/take-action and sign up as a member (you can pay $15 on line at the same time) or a supporter. The more contacts we have the stronger we are and the louder our voice is.

We also have a Facebook page at Facebook.com/supportlindfield . So if you are a Facebook user please spread the word using that medium too.

We will bring you further news as we have it. One day we may have a new Hub!! We welcome your comments and feedback to info@supportlindfield.net .

Regards,
The Support Lindfield Team
Working for our Community