Town Planning Report - Noosa Professional and Medical Centre

6. Conclusion

The application seeks to change a number of conditions of approval to better reflect the
scale and nature of development on the land. The changes sought mostly relate to the
staging of the development, altering the limits placed on some of the use areas and the
provision of car parking.

It is accepted that some use area limits should apply to the Medical and Education type
uses, but only to the extent that this affects car parking. This has been determined
having regard to the car parking rates adopted by Council’s traffic consultant. To that
end, it is suggested that the use areas for the uses be limited as follows:

    •    Commercial Business Type 2 Medical – 2000m²;
    •    Education Type 3 Adult (Student Contact) – 1,400m²;
    •    Retail Type 1 Local – 100m²; and
    •    Retail Business Type 2 Shop and Salon and Entertainment & Dining Business
         Type 1 Food and Beverages – 236m² (including outdoor dining).

Adopting the above use area limits will allow for some flexibility with respect to the
Office use, but will limit the uses that generate a higher car parking demand. For
example, if the Education use area is reduced and taken up by Office, there is no net
impact upon car parking demand. Theoretically, in this case, there is a reduction in the
demand for parking. Consequently, placing an overall limit on the amount of use area
for the development and limits on some of the uses will maintain current parking
demand.

The matter of car parking and the associated demand has been considered in detail. A
number of car parking surveys have been undertaken and this has revealed that during
peak operating times, the maximum car park usage is about 86% (307 spaces). The
peak times were considered to be either Wednesday or Thursday, between the hours of
10am to 2pm, which coincides with the peak operating time for the UCQ, while other
uses continue to operate as normal.

At the time of the more recent car parking surveys, the development was mostly fully
let, with only 75m² of office floor space being available for lease. Consequently, it is
suggested that the proposed 355 car parking spaces will be adequate for the scale of
the uses on the land. Further, given the significant cost of providing a multi-storey car
park on the site and the lack of current parking demand, it is not reasonable to require
393 car parking spaces.

For reasons given above, it considered the proposed changes to the conditions of
approval are reasonable. If Council agrees to make the proposed ‘permissible change’
to the approval then any outstanding matters of non-compliance would also be
remedied.




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“Noosa Professional and Medical Centre” – November 2014