Spare a thought for the future

WE have an old saying ‘bite the bullet’.
This appears to have been successful for the City of Casey in some areas when you look at things such as the Casey ARC, Casey Fields at Cranbourne, Sweeney Reserve, Narre Warren, the council’s major community development programs, the performing arts rehearsal centre, a new aquatic centre to be built at Cranbourne, Pioneers Park, Berwick, Monash University, and Chisholm Institute campuses.
These facilities will in two decades make the City of Casey enormously strong as a target area for people wanting established homes and communities with facilities and family support systems. But there should and could be more.
I feel frustrated when I hear a deadpan reaction to suggestions such as one from the Berwick Village Chamber of Commerce to underground the Berwick Railway Station and railway line extending back past Clyde Road.
We were told during a City of Casey media conference that it was immediately obvious such a project was not feasible because the floor space generated would not hold enough value to pay for the project.
We were told that if the idea were feasible it would have been done at inner suburban stations.
Maybe they will do such things when they start looking more seriously at proposals like rail duplication and doubledecker trains.
Both are off the agenda because the rail easement is too narrow for duplication and we have too many overhead bridges to run doubledecker trains. So far, they can’t even run the trains on time so I guess we’ve got a long way to go.
Why can’t we afford to build the Berwick railway station underground?
This would free up thousands of square metres of land and provide space for a workable traffic system, plus adequately designed residential units in an area around the station, nowadays portrayed as ‘activity centres’. Such a project would link the education and medical precinct with the village.
One idea floated by government planners is that people living in activity centres would not need to own a car because public transport would be readily available.
The City of Casey had a dream to build what I thought was a wonderful centre on land it owns at Fountain Gate that would have provided a stateoftheart shopping complex to complement the existing centre, a new civic centre, major arts centre and library at no cost to ratepayers.
But, big money has almost certainly put paid to that idea and the council at this stage seems to be losing heart in the idea because ultimately cash counts most.
I would like to see the City of Casey and Shire of Cardinia join forces to set up a ‘think tank’ of 10 or 11 ‘imaginative’ citizens who were not overburdened with political correctness or fear of what a thing would cost, to look at and suggest ‘outlandish’ projects that could pay off in the long term for people living in the south east.
That could be a costfree interesting exercise that would, with the right people, generate lively debate.
Who knows, even one major icon for the area could eventuate.