I am supportive of increased housing close to railway stations but object to the height of the proposed project.
In recent years the old single storey cottages along Carlingford Road have been replaced by 5 storey apartments. Whilst it was a pity to see the old quarter acre blocks disappear, the 5 storey height limit is acceptable ascetically (although it would have been preferable to break up the long line of similar unit blocks with periodic open space).
Also appearing in the past few years near the railway station have been skyscrapers (one definition of a skyscraper is 22 storeys plus) which are definitely out of keeping with the local Epping environment.
When I submitted a DA for small additions to the rear of our house, I had to comply with height, site coverage and floor area restrictions. I have to ask why I had to compromise my requirements when a developer can build 15 storeys and cover a large proportion of the site.
There is also the question of services for the numbers of new residents - particularly in providing sufficient school places when local schools are already overcrowded.
Ideally, height should be restricted to 5 storeys with 30% affordable housing units.
As second prize, I could be persuaded to go to 10 storeys with 15% affordable housing.
15 storeys with 5% affordable housing is too high and only paying lip service to contributing to low cost housing.
This is government land which should not be used as a profit making enterprise but should be used for the common good.

Please can we have some common sense and not allow the above for another huge apartment complex.
Epping station is dangerous during peak hour with citizens travelling towards the city. Wouldn't it be so much better to make the development in question commercial to attain a contra flow of people and to have locals working there.
On Channel 9 News last night Rob Stokes mentions "community consultation". Even when the community expresses its objection to a proposal, it seems to go ahead anyway. Sydney is becoming a very ugly place.

This construction will cause severe traffic jam.

Epping community strongly believes that there is a need for commercial property, there are plenty of residential properties in place already.

With the current high density apartments in both Epping and Carlingford and the reports advising very little can be done to ease the traffic issues on the intersection of Carlingford Rd and BEECROFT Rd as it is, I do not believe the suburb can cope with the proposed additional dwellings. Both traffic and metro / train are already heavily congested, this will just add to that. Of greater benefit could be a long term car park to better manage the metro / train users coming from other suburbs. With all the developments being residential Epping has lost the majority of commercial business which bring money and people into the suburb rather than having more residents that then travel out to go to work. I am personally opposed to the proposed development and what is reported as the lack of transparency about how it has been allowed to come so far.

Epping as a business hub needs revitalising. This project does not contain enough commercial space at only 1.5% of floor area. As 10,000 jobs have left Epping, it is essential to have a much larger commercial and retail space to bring in more workers to Epping, so that businesses can be utilised during business hours.
A key element in the Epping Traffic Study is an east-west traffic link, and this development would prevent this. Adding another 442 homes will add considerably to the traffic, as will the other 1,894 new homes at 59-79 Beecroft Rd and 49 and 53-61 Rawson St. Traffic is already very contested, and is one of the worst bottlenecks in Sydney. We need to ease congestion, not add to it. This development would add 1200 or more residents, and these people would have to use a pedestrian crossing on Carlingford to get to Epping Station if they don't use their cars.
There is insufficient open space.
It is essential that infrastructure and public amenity improvements around Epping are put into place before many hundreds of new homes are built. The number of homes is far greater than that originally proposed for Epping. There is also not sufficient open space.

The maximization of residential density is not how a responsible Government should view this site prior to its disposal. Furthermore, there is no pressing requirement to dispose of this site at all. Numerous alternative uses for the site by Council have been effectively ignored in the EIS.
For example:
• Substantial retail and commercial development is also needed in Epping to maintain and enhance the vibrancy and mix of use of the Town Centre.
• There is effectively no public space in the proposed use of the site.
• Council wish to use part of the site for a roadway that would help alleviate traffic on Carlingford Road/Beecroft Road intersection
• The current proposal for 5% affordable housing disregards the Government’s own stated policy position of 20% and there is no guarantee there will be any affordable housing once the site is sold to a developer who can then appeal to the Land and Environment Court and modify an approved DA.
• It is high time for the State Government to behave like a responsible custodian for the public good and, in the case of Epping, it needs to “Do no harm” while ever there is no plan to describe the cumulative effects of all of the development proposed and being built in Epping.
• It is essential that there be a commitment to a full public review of all major developments proposed for the western side of the railway line, before any more are approved
• This site, which is already in public hands, is too good an opportunity to enhance Epping Town Centre to waste on yet more poorly constructed, ugly residential high rise. A good State Government, with a Local Member who actually cared about the Suburb he represents, would see the obvious need to change or pause the current paradigm for how the State manages public land it deems as ‘surplus’.

“The mere saying of something does not make it so”

Section 11, the Conclusion of the EIS, lists a number of dot points in support of the Application that, with the exception of dot point 4 (yes, the site is currently zoned for high rise residential), are all contestable. The statements are too general to be rigorously compared against the bewilderingly complex series of planning statements, policies and directives etc that currently apply in NSW. So numerous and overlapping and complex are these instruments now that, when taken as a whole, any outcome the State Government so desires can be supported from somewhere in the morass. Plausible deniability for maladministration by decision makers can therefore be hidden even from an interested and engaged citizenry who are slowly becoming more aware of how current planning processes may not be in the long-term public interest of either their locality nor their State.

Each potential high rise development site in Epping is currently being considered by planning authorities individually with little or no reference to the cumulative impact on the Epping community when all of the individual developments are totaled up. As The Epping Civic Trust notes on its website currently regarding the 242-244 Beecroft Road SSD Application:

“this site is not being seen properly in conjunction with other developments, or within the greater context of the challenges facing the Epping Town Centre which the City of Parramatta council are having to deal with.”

When the Minister makes his decision to approve an extra 450 residential units on the SSD site the residents of Epping need him to be cognisant of the fact that a few hundred meters away in Rawson Street a further 700 unit and a 1194 unit development are already in the planning stages and they too will be considered individually.

I do not have access to the resources of the State Government nor the space here to comment on all of the claims made in the EIS but by way of example I will make some observations about the references in the EIS to traffic and the proposed number of car spaces in the current design. An analogy may be helpful here with the logic of Prime Minister Morrison’s statement that Australia is only responsible for 1% of world greenhouse gas emissions. He then directly goes on to say that as our contribution is such a small part of the total that therefore nothing we do in Australia will impact much on the climate warming resulting from total greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously though, if each country takes that attitude towards their respective contribution to climate warming then climate warming will worsen given current trends. Similarly, in the Traffic and Transport Study quoted in the EIS, the extra traffic generated by the 450 units proposed is said to be about 1% of current peak road use which is so small an impact as to not significantly affect peak traffic congestion that much. But add that extra 1% to the extra 2-4% of extra traffic generated by only the two Rawson Street proposals I mentioned above and the already gridlocked roads of Beecroft and Carlingford Roads at peak times become foreseeably unusable for much of the day. There are at present no effective measures, no ‘silver bullets’ yet identified to fix the existing traffic problems in Epping let alone deal with extra traffic generated by the new unit developments in local streets around the station especially at peak times. Over the years a number of traffic studies of Epping have ‘tinkered’ around the edges of the road problem but an integrated whole of suburb approach is now needed before any more development on the Western side of Epping railway is approved.

The Traffic and Transport Study also considers that the provision of only 350 parking spaces for a development of 442 units at 242-244 Beecroft Road is acceptable because the buildings will be close to stations and buses. However this is an assumption for which no evidence is presented and a number of contradictory points can be made. Firstly, there is no evidence that residents who live near public transport will all use public transport. They may do during the week. But public transport services are reduced over weekends and maintenance is routinely performed on the train system at weekends so unit residents are likely to continue to need a car and that car, or cars, will need to be parked somewhere. Already on the Eastern side of Epping with only 3 completed high rise towers, tower residents without a parking space or with additional vehicles are parking long-term in the rail commuter parking and in nearby local streets. The CBUS development at Langston Place has been approved to have 529 parking spaces for 463 units and is currently the ‘gold standard’ for parking provision in Epping high rise developments. The proposed number of car parking spaces for the current size of the development at 242-244 Beecroft Road is unacceptable because experience from the Eastern side of Epping clearly shows that nearby residents will be adversely affected.

Once the site is sold by the State Government the after SSD Application approval by the Minister, the Government ‘washes its hands’ of any changes the subsequent owner may choose to make to the currently proposed design before undertaking the build. Lessons from other high rise developments in Epping (eg 44-48 Oxford Street) and other parts of Sydney are that current planning law allows developers who get ‘green remorse’ over early agreements to provide ‘green’ inclusions like car share spaces or bike parking spaces or reductions in overall car parking space numbers can subsequently modify their Development Applications or seek the assistance of The Land and Environment Court when they decide to renege.

The problem of independence and perceptions of independence are important with regard to this site. The Minister is reminded the site was compulsorily acquired by the State Government for a legitimate and important purpose (building of the North-West Metro) but as the owner the State Government is free to be creative with what it now does with the site. It does not have to behave like any other developer trying only to maximize financial return from a site it owns. The local residents and Parramatta City Council want other uses for the site seriously considered (they are not taken seriously in the EIS sections that discuss alternative uses) and as they have the long term responsibility for making Epping workable and liveable theirs are the most independent interests that should be given higher priority than a short-term financial decision and bottom line financial boost to Government coffers when the Minister considers the SSD Application. The Parramatta City Council’s Epping Planning Review is mentioned on page 35 of the EIS but concerns raised by the Council are cursorily dismissed in my opinion.

In conclusion, the EIS findings are based on reports which were commissioned by Landcom to support the SSD Application. The reports therefore are not commissioned independently. The subsequent assembling of those reports into the SSD Application by the Minister’s own Department could not seriously be considered in any way ‘arms-length’ or independent. That the owner of the site is the State Government, the same State Government that makes the planning decision and stands to gain financially from an approval of the SSD Application during a period of falling stamp duty revenue for the State could appear a problematic process to an outside observer (ie it may fail the ‘pub test’). Such a possible failure is complicated further by the local State Member of Parliament being the State’s current Treasurer at a time of falling State revenues. As the new local member for Epping, the current Treasurer has yet to meaningfully engage with the concerns being raised by what many in his electorate fear is an already ‘out of control’ planning process. These fears will continue to grow until residents have before them an integrated plan for the whole of Epping Town Centre that contains the level of detail showing how 10,000 extra units and at least 30,000 more residents can live successfully immediately around Epping Station in co-existence with the interests of existing residents.

The Minister is respectfully asked to reject or at least defer the SSD Application as the concept of the ‘public interest’ test as defined by his own Department in assembling the Application he is assessing is too narrow. The public interest needs to be reconsidered more widely and, at the very least, following a more sincere and respectful consultative process with the residents of and Council responsible for Epping.

As a long term resident of Epping I am finding the overdevelopment of my suburb distressing. The suburb is in desperate need of commuter parking and business - not more residential buildings. There is a glut now and those built aren't sold. There are plenty more coming with little commercial space and retail outlets.
This development is of pure greed and not in the public interest. The public interest lies in parking and commercial space to prevent the suburb become mainly residential. I have cars parked out the front of my property all day. The drivers park here and commute to the station via bus - we are 1km from the station. If government were to serve the best interests of residents it would build a car park just as nearly every station along the Northern line and now Sydney metro stations have.

This is the chance to get it right and avert a disaster in more units that locals don't need or want. We need infrastructure and planning - not financial gain in the short term.
Government will get revenue every single day for each car parked. A one of lump sum for residential flats or revenue for all time. It is the most logical solution to provide long term parking for the commuters who use Epping station everyday.

See attached file