September 23, 2014
A well-attended public meeting held at the Blackbutt Community Hall on Monday night has given overwhelming support for a South Burnett Regional Council plan to try to get a supermarket built in the town.
The meeting was called by South Burnett Mayor Wayne Kratzmann to gauge the community’s feeling about moving the Blackbutt Community Hall to a new location so a developer could build a supermarket on the site.
The meeting was advertised by letters sent to all Blackbutt and Benarkin residents last week.
A capacity crowd of more than 300 filled the hall to hear details of the proposal from the Mayor and Council’s Economic Development Manager Phil Harding.
The meeting was also attended by Deputy Mayor Cr Keith Campbell, councillors Deb Palmer, Kathy Duff and Damien Tessmann, and senior Council staff.
The Mayor said the purpose of the meeting was simply to lay out the idea and get the community’s feelings about it.
“We’ll never get 100 per cent agreement on any idea,” he said, “and if locals don’t want the hall moved, that’s fine. We’re just here to find out what the community thinks.”
He then explained that ever since he was elected in 2012, the need to get a supermarket in the town was a constant issue that kept re-occurring in discussions with local residents.
Two previous proposals to get a supermarket for Blackbutt had both fallen over.
“Council are not developers, we’re enablers,” Mayor Kratzmann said.
So Council had started talking to supermarket developers to find out what they were looking for, as well as looking at potential sites where a supermarket could be built.
“Cr Deb Palmer talked up the town’s tennis court site, so we suggested that site to people who were interested,” Mayor Kratzmann said.
“But the feedback we got was that to get an investor, they (ie the developers) needed a main street frontage.”
The Mayor said this feedback then led them to look at other CBD sites, and the hall site came up, as well as the idea of relocating the hall to another location to free up the two corner blocks the complex sits on.
He said the idea of the two blocks had produced a positive response from Metcash IGA, so if the community supported the idea the next step would be to put the project out to tender.
This was a process that would likely take at least six months, but even then a supermarket still would not be guaranteed.
“We may put this out to tender and get zero responses, or one, or a dozen,” Mayor Kratzmann said.
“But Council has received an Expression of Interest so we must respond to it.”
He stressed no decision had yet been made.
“We’re here to listen to you,” he said, adding that Council’s primary concern was that the overall proposal should be cost-neutral to ratepayers.
He said Council didn’t have the money to move the Hall itself, and the proposal hadn’t been budgeted. So any developer would have to move the Community Hall at their own cost as part of a tender for the site.
He promised that until a tender was accepted by the Council, and a contract signed, the hall would not be touched.
“You won’t wind up with an empty block and no supermarket. This is the people’s hall and it belongs to the people of Blackbutt-Benarkin,” he said.
Mr Harding then took to the floor to explain the tender process the Council would undertake.
This would include obtaining permissions from the Department Of Main Roads and other regulatory bodies, as well as community consultations on any new site selected for the hall.
The floor was then thrown open for questions, and more than a dozen speakers rose to their feet to express their support for the concept.
Several said they thought having a supermarket in Blackbutt would enhance property values, create employment opportunities for younger residents and encourage population growth – all things that were badly needed in the town.
Others said while they acknowledged the hall had a lot of happy associations for many residents from the many years it had stood on the site, moving the hall to a new location – probably near the railhead or Blackbutt Showgrounds – would not diminish those associations in any way.
Mr Peter Scott, from Taromeo, said he was confident Council would receive more than one bid if the project was put out to tender. He said he had been in discussions with a different group he thought would also be interested in the site.
One resident asked if the State Government could derail the project; another expressed concern that a modern supermarket could upset the town’s existing streetscape; and a third asked if the Council had obtained any costings for moving the Hall and whether this extra cost might make the project unviable.
But when a show-of-hands vote was taken, there was almost unanimous endorsement from the meeting for the Council to progress the idea, with fewer than a dozen people opposed to it.
Blackbutt artist Ursula Mackay told southburnett.com.au she was so excited by the concept she was going to withdraw her property from the market.
“If I could do my supermarket shopping here in town and not have to travel, I have no reason to move,” she said.
Before the meeting, southburnett.com.au also spoke with Mr David Ho, the owner of the Blackbutt General Store, a CBD business most likely to be adversely affected by the development of a supermarket in the town.
Mr Ho said that most Blackbutt residents used his store to purchase convenience items such as cigarettes, milk and other perishables, but did their “trolley shopping” at Yarraman or other supermarkets in Kingaroy or the Brisbane Valley.
He said he has been trying to sell the business for several years.
He said if Council wanted to help get a supermarket established in the town, they should also assist him to sell out.
- Related article: Public Meeting To Discuss Supermarket
