This Sydney block can have 300 apartments. The developer wants hundreds more

Bennelong Cove was promised to be the epitome of luxurious waterside living in Sydney’s most densely populated suburb.

Nine hundred apartments would stretch out from Wentworth Point over the Parramatta River, in what developer Billbergia envisioned to be the final pieces of its decade-long work on the peninsula, which sits just north of Sydney Olympic Park and opposite Rhodes.

Plans for the site – known as Block H, which now houses old industrial sheds – have been in the works since at least 2018. But years of community surveys, debates across three terms of the City of Parramatta council and mentions on the floor of state parliament came to nothing, and in January 2023, the Department of Planning took control of any decision about the site from the council.

At the heart of the matter was whether the gross floor area in the development rules, called development control plans (DCP), should be changed in line with Billbergia’s request. The rules currently allow the development of 32,400 square metres (about 350 apartments).

Billbergia is seeking an extension of the gross floor area to 98,619 square metres (about 1000 units) to build two 40-storey towers about 18 metres apart. As part of the build, it would invest $70 million in community and social infrastructure under an agreement with the council.

But after almost two years, the Department of Planning had still not made a ruling. And, in a letter to the council days before Christmas, department secretary Kiersten Fishburn said she was giving back control of the decision to the council.

In a December 20 letter obtained by the Herald, Fishburn told the City of Parramatta: “I acknowledge the time taken to resolve this matter and offer my apologies.”

The letter, the council’s chief executive Gail Connolly said in a statement, meant “the department has ceased its assessment of the developer’s proposal and has instead returned this responsibility to the Council, despite having had the application for almost two years”.

“The department offered its apologies for the time taken to process the matter to date,” she said.

Fishburn did not offer a reason for the change in her letter, but a spokesperson for the department said: “The department delegated the DCP back to council to ensure there is a close interconnection between the DCP amendment and the Planning Agreement, to make sure any associated community benefits of the development would be aligned with changes to the DCP.”

Council staff will prepare a report for councillors to review before making a decision later this year.

When the department took control of the saga, Billbergia made another proposal: instead of a 50-storey tower and a 40-storey tower, they applied for changes to allow two 40-storey towers. (A separate development application would still need to be approved.)

The department held a public consultation over three months and then made no public communications about it for 10 months until it wrote to the council and released the results of the survey.

Of the 1130 responses – a huge amount compared to the average community consultation – 636 people said they supported the development (44 per cent of them gave detailed reasons why), while 480 people said they opposed it (94 per cent of them gave detailed reasons why).

Those who oppose it do so voraciously.

“Block H forms part of what was a larger site,” Parramatta Labor MP Donna Davis, who used to be the city’s mayor, said in a speech against the plan changes in the state parliament last year. “Gross floor area was taken from Block H and placed on an adjacent site and now the developer has come back for a second bite at the cherry.”

“Approving this will add unimaginable pressure on [the only road into the peninsula] Hill Road and place further strain on existing public infrastructure,” she said.

For years, Wentworth Point residents have warned their suburb has been buckling under the pressure of having too many residents and not enough infrastructure to go with it.

The peninsula has two bus services that take residents to Strathfield and Chatswood, and Billbergia operates a free shuttle bus to Rhodes over the footbridge. (The developer said it would continue to provide this service until January 2031 as part of its agreement to invest in the community if its DCP changes were approved.) The second stage of the Parramatta light rail will go through the area.

A nearby synthetic grass park, also owned by Billbergia, was recently expanded – but residents still have very little open green space.

Despite only being built in 2018, the public primary school is bursting at the seams, though a new high school with space for 1500 welcomed year 7 students to the first day of the school’s operation on Thursday.

Billbergia declined to comment.

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