PGRA attends 2050 Summit

After all the excitement of our Neighbours’ Day event and Easter egg hunt, the past month has been relatively quiet for the Parkville Gardens Residents’ Association (PGRA). We’re planning a surprise event for late June so watch this space.

There are a few things that we are waiting for with eager anticipation. The first is feedback on our funding applications for the upcoming financial year.

We expect to know by the end of this month whether we have been successful or not. Keeping fingers crossed that we’ll be able to continue staging events that draw the community together in a safe and enjoyable way. That’s what we love to do.

We’re also waiting to hear what local residents had to say to the City of Melbourne about pedestrian and road safety in the neighbourhood. We expect feedback sometime this month.

In the meantime work has just commenced to repair and upgrade the footpath around the Galada Ave Reserve. That’s scheduled to take a couple of weeks.

I was pleased to be able to represent PGRA at the Melbourne 2050 Summit at Town Hall on Friday, May 9. Several hundred participants got enthusiastically involved in the process to imagine what they’d like Melbourne to be 25 years down the track.

Lots of ideas, some practical, others very ambitious, all thought-provoking. It’s going to take the council a while to digest the wealth of ideas and present them back to us.

One piece of feedback we have received was disappointing. The Minister for Housing, Harriet Shing, responded to our appeal for the community centre the neighbourhood was originally promised.

She replied to say that there were “no plans to revisit the site for a dedicated community centre”. Not the news we wanted to hear, but we’ll keep pursuing the issue.

The Royal Park Master Plan consultation generated so much information and opinion that the draft has been delayed until much later in the year. We look forward to that. •