Latest news from Parkville Gardens

This communiqué from Parkville Gardens can begin again with good news!

Sixty local residents – 50 adults and 10 children – came together to enjoy a festive community dinner on Friday, June 25, just before the end of the financial year. The venue was the Reggio Calabria Club, where our genial host was Carlo Parvia.

Our community dinner was subsidised by the Parkville Gardens Residents’ Association (PGRA) with significant support from the City of Melbourne. The response was terrific, certainly our most successful such event in recent years, especially in the face of lingering anxieties about coronavirus transmission. The PGRA committee was particularly pleased at the number of new members who came on board because of us engaging more broadly with the community.

We were pleased to have Tim Read, State Member for Brunswick, as our guest to thank him for his advocacy on our behalf for a better bus service. He succeeded in securing extra funding in the recent state budget. We look forward to having this translated into a more frequent service, especially during peak hours. This will be even more needed when the impending residential tower of 150 units of social housing is completed.

Tim took the opportunity to seek feedback from the gathering about issues of concern. The principal matters raised were …

The return of planning authority for the precinct back to the City of Melbourne

Rational rezoning of the area to make accessible primary and secondary schools available

Better lighting of footpaths for the security of pedestrians at night, especially at the southern end of the neighbourhood

Charging stations for electric vehicles, to name just a few.

We’ll be doing our best to maintain a collaborative partnership with Tim to continue generating favourable outcomes for the Parkville Gardens community.

A special mention needs to be given to the City of Melbourne for the grants we received in 2020. These help us cover operational and administrative costs as well as support for events we hold across the community. Much to our disappointment we weren’t successful with our application for community engagement funding for 2021, so our ability to hold functions in the second half of this year is constrained. We are exploring options to secure funding from other sources for one-off events. Our AGM will be held in the last quarter of the calendar year.

We were pleased to have Fiona Darling, our City of Melbourne community liaison person, at our June committee meeting. She brought us up to date about restructuring of the council’s community development unit and the council plans to engage with 11 neighbourhoods in the municipality. Just as each neighbourhood has diverse precincts within it, so too is Parkville Gardens a distinct component of the Parkville neighbourhood with its own characteristics and needs. The association will continue to champion them  •