People who own property within Shellharbour village have every right to be worried. The council is thinking of slapping a Heritage Conservation Zone ruling on their homes. If this goes ahead they will be prevented from making any change to their property without it first getting full approval from the council - and that means everything from applying a coat of paint without the council choosing the colour to renewing fittings such as shade awnings over windows or replacing a letterbox.
The whole point of a Heritage Conservation order is to freeze buildings within a gazetted zone in some sort of time warp - so that those interested in the past can view with nostalgia the way we lived in yesteryear ! It completely ignores the fact that owning homes in that time zone represents the biggest outlay in the owner's life and that we are condemning those owners to maintain the same standard of living as our parents and grand parents. It is almost a form of acquisition - but without compensation.
If this goes ahead, owners wanting to install solar roof panels to generate electricity will be refused council permission - because such items were not part of the visual scene that the Heritage Conservation order is trying to preserve.
Many people think gazetting this order is a case of " too little and too late ". Change had already overtaken the old Shellharbour village and it will be impossible to roll back to a past era and all that will be achieved is to impose a blanket of misery on present owner's lives.
It is certainly an imposition to slap a control order on people who bought their present homes in good faith and have plans to modernise - or in some cases - demolish and use the site for a new dwelling. There has been no attempt to gauge the consent of these owners. A capricious council is seeking to ride roughshod over any objections and bulldoze the order into law.
If this zoning goes ahead it will certainly cause a steep drop in resale values, and that means a loss that few can really afford. Perhaps we need a law change to provide at least a measure of compensation - and that would be something to make council think long and hard before imposing such draconian measures.
Perhaps freedom from paying rates could automatically apply in a Heritage zone - and if homes must be preserved in their original form - then maybe maintaining that image should be at council expense.
It is certainly grossly unfair to simply impose a Heritage order - and leave the owners to pickup the bill !
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