The Galway City Council must work with Westside residents to enhance recreational facilities in the area and stop pursuing “continuous indiscriminate building that ill serves communities”.
This is the view of Labour Cllr Colette Connolly, who has welcomed the support she received at Monday’s city council meeting for her call to rezone lands in Corrib Park.
At the meeting, Cllr Connolly called on city manager Joe MacGrath to vary the Galway City Development Plan 2005 - 2011 to rezone residential lands in Corrib Park to residential and amenity.
Cllr Connolly had put this motion before council in April but city manager Joe MacGrath felt it was best to seek legal advice on the matter. In August, the legal advice returned saying the councillors had the right to instruct the city manager to commence a variation process under Section 140 of the Local Government Act 2001.
Cllr Connolly then resubmitted her motion and it was discussed this week at City Hall. Councillors felt the call was necessary to protect a popular green area in Westside after proposals had emerged to build houses on part of the site.
The motion received unanimous support from the other councillors and the proposal to rezone will go on public display before coming back to council for a final decision.
Once the public advertisement is published residents will have a period of four weeks to make a submission. Following this the Manager has a further four weeks within which to make his report in relation to the submissions and outline his opinion to councillors.
The manager’s report must then be deliberated and voted on by councillors within six weeks of publication of same.
With the revelations which emerged from the planning tribunals in the late 1990s, ‘rezoning’ has become a dirty word. Cllr Connolly says that she appreciates the seriousness of varying the CDP and has previously voted against variations in relation to rezoning in Briarhill, on the advice of the city manager and planners.
She made an exception in this instance as she believes rezoning the land to recreational and amenity is “in the public good as it seeks to remediate an oversight in the 2004 Plan, which left the area with an R zoning”.
