www.yarra.org

One of the other recommendations of councils Liquor Licensing Management Working Group was -
(a) Council officers commence the preparation of a draft Local Law for the purpose of controlling noise from commercial premises;

Council passed a resolution to draft a law, but what happened was a circus of stuff up, delays, and sabotage. The end result was that almost a year later the council voted to 'not continue' with the local law.
This occurred due to a number of senior staff actively apposing the creation of such a law ie (and I quote) "if we have it it will make more work for us, which we don't want".

The law is desperately needed in Yarra ->

The key section of the Local Law is
- 47 Emission of Music Noise
47.1 The owner or occupier of a liquor license premise must not cause or allow to be emitted from the premise unreasonable noise.
47.2 For the purposes of clause 47.1, noise is to be taken to be unreasonable if it is unreasonable having regard to: 47.2.1 its volume, intensity or duration;
and
47.2.2 the time, place and other circumstances in which it is emitted.
48 Noise by Patrons
48.1 The owner or occupier of a liquor license premise must not cause or allow patrons to emit unreasonable noise while at, entering or exiting the liquor license premises.
48.2 For the purposes of clause 48.1, noise is to be taken to be unreasonable if it is unreasonable having regard to: 48.2.1 its volume, intensity or duration; and
48.2.2 the time, place and other circumstances in which it is emitted.

I have attached to this post my submission to Council about the local law from the 2/7/2006 - it is a good summary of the issue.

Motion: That Council re start the process to implement a local law governing sound from licensed premises.

It's clear that Yarra has never seriously enforced the footpath trading policy - even a quick walk around bridge rd near the town hall would confirm that - the real question is why and how can it be fixed?

Anyone with 15 minutes of training could hand out 100 fines in a couple of days, and a significant number of places have not complied ONCE since the introduction of the policy over 5 years ago..

No amount of resident complaint or Councilor questioning seems to change this, so it is now to the point that an external body should come in and see why the policy is not being enforced ie is it corruption, or simply that officers don't support the policy so will not enforce it?

Motion: That the City of Yarra employ an appropriate external body to investigate why the City of Yarra refuses to enforce their own footpath trading policy and local law, to report back to the full council.

Visiting just about anywhere in inner city Melbourne, and you have to pay to park.

Apart from Yarra - which provides free parking down all the side streets next to the shopping strips, and doesn't even have metered parking in the evening on some of the main roads..

This is even given Yarra Councils stated policy that visitors should pay, and it's thoretical priority for residential parking. In reality, Yarra is the most pro car Council in inner city Melbourne.

What should be happening is a lot more parking meters should be installed, including along the residential streets that run down to the main shopping strips - you simply make the meters permit exempt.

Meters not only make people pay for parking - thus discouraging them to drive when they don't have to and helping Council finances - but they also greatly help enforcement of parking restrictions.

For example, on the street I live, 90% of it is 2 hour parking during the day. But people have learned, and the numbers support this, that the chance of a ticket is very low - so they ignore the restrictions.
Or even worse, I know of a local business that has tens of works parking in two hour spots, they just go out and shuffle their cars at lunch time...

Meters stop that - as they make enforcement very easy.

Motion: For a report to come back to council outlining areas in Yarra that it would be appropriate to install meters to manage demand, aid enforcement, and promote no car transport.

One of the recommendations from councils Liquor Licensing Management Working Group was to add late night parking restrictions near the night club precincts.

This was to try and to stop 1) drunk patrons causing a lot of noise and other amenity problems when they came back to their cars parked on residential streets and 2) drunk people driving at all ie encourage them to take taxis rather than park for free all night in the local residential streets.

Two areas were suggest for a trial - 1) off swan st, between church and Punt rd and 2) of Brunswick Rd

Council refused, stating that it did not have the money in the budget to change the street signs. When the following years budget was being formed, I asked for it to be included but it was refused.

Of course, finding the couple of $k for signs wasn't the real issue, it was more that a number of councilors strongly supported the night clubs and didn't want to put them off side.

Motion: To implement the Liquor Licensing Management Working Group recommendation of a trial of tighter late night parking restrictions off Swan St and Brunswick street.

Where 'tighter' in this context would mean permit only on ALL local residential parking within 200m of the main street, from midnight to 7.30am, 7 days a week.

Yarra is the only Melbourne council so pro cars that it gives its business users parking permits for their staff to park on residential streets....
One there is only a few thousand permits, they are concentrated in the areas where there is the most parking demand - ie the shop owners park down the side (residential) streets.

One of the recommendations of the Parking Community Advisory Committee years ago was to change the permit sticker for business users so that we could at least see where they were parking.

Resolution: That the City of Yarra changes the vehicle permit sticker for non residential users to something that is easily identifiable as a non residential parking permit.