News / Planning
Off-street parking to be lost to open space
Street closure abandoned after backlash from Greek church
Mark Phillips
MOST of a public car park will be absorbed into community open space after Merri-bek Council endorsed the preferred design of the planned new Sydney Road park.
The design avoids the closure of Staley Street, which was bitterly opposed by local residents and the St Vasilios Greek Orthodox Church, but will mean the loss of 18 off-street parking spaces.
They will be replaced with a new configuration of on-street parking on the south-western section of Staley Street, which will become angled rather than parallel. Council staff say this will result in a net increase in the area of two spots to a total of 59.
The changes would result in 17 new free two-hour parking spaces on Staley Street and shift five business permit spaces onto the street. Council staff said the new configuration would also serve as a traffic calming measure.
Twenty residential permit spaces on the street would be kept. Part of the off-street car park will be retained with 15 paid bays and two spots for accessible parking.
This means that the new park, which will include vacant land bought by the council at 568 Sydney Road (opposite Hope Street), will have a total area of 1550 square metres.
The proposed approach was adopted by the council at its meeting on March 11 following public consultation last year which raised the hackles of many local residents, including St Vasilios’ parishioners.
The public consultation identified two competing priorities from the community: those who valued public car parking and road access, and those who wanted a larger park and improved walking and cycling connections.
Over the six-week engagement period, more than 2000 responses were received to an online survey along with hundreds of in-person and email comments.
The church community had been totally opposed to the closure of Staley Street, which was one of three options that the council sought public feedback on.
Closing the street would have allowed a larger park of about 2000 square metres but the church said this would have made it inaccessible to elderly parishioners.
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But while they won the battle to keep Staley Street open, the option chosen by the council is still the least preferred by the church.
Speaking at the council meeting last Wednesday, St Vasilios’ parish committee vice-president Peter Nikolakakos said the church’s community favoured a hybrid option of retaining the entire off-street car park while also reconfiguring on-street parking.
“The loss of existing [off-street] car spaces means that these spaces will never be available again and replacing them with on-street parking allows the potential for them to be converted to permit parking at a later point in time,” he said.
“On top of this it will also place additional pressure on the already limited parking in the area, to the detriment of shoppers, visitors and local residents.”
Andy Fergus, a founding member of the Better Breese Block group, said for apartment dwellers access to more public open space was important for their quality of life, and he urged the council to maximise the size of the new park as much as possible. But at the same time, he said the Greek community was part of the fabric of Brunswick and their views should be respected.
Councillor Liz Irvin, within whose Randazzo ward the new park will sit, said by extending onto the car park land it would gain an extra 500 square metres and be three times the size of Michelle Guglielmo Park, further south on Sydney Road.
“The solution here is clever and fair,” she said. “Staley Street is an unusually wide street for Brunswick and this allows us to put in 90 degree parking instead of parallel parking which means that in a very rare situation we actually have our cake and eat it too.
“We can deliver a larger park of 1550 square metres, and we can actually increase the number of car parking spots compared to what’s there today.”
But councillor Helen Politis backed by councillor Katerine Theodosis unsuccessfully sought to adopt the Greek community’s preferred option by restricting the new park to just the vacant block on Sydney Road while keeping all the existing off-street spaces.
“We need to make car park amenity available for people so they can engage with the community, so they can support their trade, so they can do things like go to the doctor’s, go to the pharmacy,” Politis said.
“In order to keep our community thriving and connected and to practice the inclusiveness we talk about, I think it is really critical we retain the parking that we already have.”
The final approach which was adopted by a vote of 7-3 includes a guarantee that any future changes to parking in Staley Street – including the introduction of residential permit only parking – would need to come back to the council chamber for approval.
The new park will not open for another two years.
A report to last week’s council meeting said the estimated cost of the new park will be about $1.1 million with a simple green open space model intended. The council has secured a state government grant of $250,000 with the balance of the cost to be funded through its open space reserve.
New line markings and other minor improvements on Staley Street will cost another $30,000.
A second round of community consultation will be undertaken in the second half of this year after the concept designs for the new park are released. Construction would begin in late-2027 and the park would open in 2028.
The opening paragraph to this story has been edited to clarify that some off-street parking will be kept.
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