Helping Ocean Grove to be a better place for our community
Coastal Forum – cycle and pedestrian path from Ocean Grove to Point Lonsdale
At COGG’s meeting on Tuesday 28 June, 2022, the City of Greater Geelong Council endorsed the draft Southeast Bellarine Coast (4W-Collendina) Coastal and Marine Management Plan for public exhibition and community engagement until 7 August 2022.
https://yoursay.geelongaustralia.com.au/CMMP
https://yoursay.geelongaustralia.com.au/download_file/4143/1734
The project, an initiative of the OGCA, is up and running. Watch a quick 2 minute YouTube video introduction to the project.
‘Follow’ the Have Your Say page https://yoursay.geelongaustralia.com.au/SBCS to receive updates about this project.
The year ended 30th June 2021 (FY21) was another extraordinarily challenging period for Barwon Coast due to COVID 19 shutdowns. However, we successfully completed several major projects while providing high quality services to the coast and its many users.
Read our 2020/21 Annual report to find out about:
https://www.barwoncoast.com.au/sites/default/files/bccm_annual_report_2021_v7-web.pdf
31 May 2021
Southern Bellarine Coastal Forum – Update. Following the successful 2019 Forum and a subsequent business case put to Council by the OGCA the Council have agreed to fund a project manager. This is great news and a step forward. The role of the project manager is “to establish a multi-disciplinary panel of experts and stakeholders to examine options, and report on the benefits of amalgamating the Buckley Park Coastal Reserve and the Lake Victoria wetlands into a better-protected, single iconic wildlife and cultural heritage park”. This will progress the objectives of the vision statement produced in July 2019 by the OGCA’s Southern Bellarine Coastal Forum: “The Southern Bellarine Coastal Project will deliver a sustainable conservation and heritage driven protected environmental area that provides community education and is supported by sensitively placed and well managed walking paths and bike trails that connect Ocean Grove and Point Lonsdale.”
See our documents tab for more information including our Report from the 2019 Forum.
The Southern Bellarine Coastal Forum held at the Shell Road Pavilion in Ocean Grove on Friday 21 June 2019 was a great success with almost 130 people in attendance representing a variety of views on what should and should not be permitted to occur in the rural area to the south of Shell Road between the townships of Ocean Grove and Point Lonsdale.
11 excellent speakers helped all the participants to better understand and appreciate the cultural, environmental, recreational and tourism opportunities and risks of the area. Led by Ocean Grove based professional forum facilitators Martin De Los Rios and Sofiah Mackay using sophisticated software allowed participants with smart phones or other mobile devices to ask questions and express opinions live in the forum. All participants then actively engaged in small group discussion sessions after each speaker to identify and document their views on the opportunities and risks.
In summary, there was generally support for some form of off-road link or links for safe walking and safe cycling but the route it should take must be very strongly influenced by the environment and cultural issues expertly described by the presenters and audience members.
Now the hard work begins as we need to review all the presentations, work through the questions raised, and analyse the inputs and impressions of the participants and draft a report. We think this will us at least three to four weeks, however we will provide regular updates on the Ocean Grove Community Association website and on our facebook page.
Pdf copies of most of the speakers presentations should be on our website in a week or so under the “Documents” tab.
Ocean Grove Community Association would like to thank our speakers, all our forum partners, our facilitators and all the participants who collectively made this great forum possible.