February 15, 2017
The South Burnett Regional Council will be putting Hivesville Hall on the market.
At Wednesday’s Council meeting, Councillors voted to sell off the 93-year-old public hall at market value.
Interested buyers can either purchase the building and the land it sits on as a package, just the land itself, or just the hall, providing they remove it from the site.
Cr Kathy Duff told the meeting she had consulted with Hivesville residents about retiring the hall from Council’s asset register prior to the decision.
She said the hall had once been in regular use, but it had steadily fallen into disuse over the years and hadn’t been maintained.
Now it wasn’t worth the cost of restoration.
She said residents were sad to see the hall go but understood the reason Council needed to dispose of it.
Cr Duff recalled that many years ago she had regularly gone to dances at the hall, and one year had even won “Hivesville Social Princess” there.
She was so proud of the sash that when she got back home she had woken her parents so they could take a photograph of her.
Cr Terry Fleischfresser said Council had inherited Hivesville Hall along with a number of other disused public halls in the 2008 Council amalgamations.
All the region’s assets were a cost to Council whether they were used or not, he said, so it made good economic sense to retire disused assets and apply the funds towards services that residents wanted now.
Cr Duff said some Hivesville residents expressed the hope that when the hall was sold, some of the proceeds could be used to construct a smaller building in the town that could be used for public meetings and small functions.
She recommended Council consider this request.
The motion to sell the hall was carried unanimously.
