Hotel blight on beautiful part of the Coast

So the ungrateful serfs of Patonga who have been so bold as to oppose the proposed development and expansion of the Patonga Hotel and Fish Shop should be ashamed of themselves for daring to attempt to protect their village.

Perhaps the villagers were expected to tug their forelocks, bend their knees and support the gross over development of a site that is obviously already so monstrously over developed that it causes traffic, noise and parking chaos every weekend.

The hotel should never have been approved and all of those matters raised in opposition to the original development are now being shown to have been correct.

Despite the public road, the public footpath and public beachfront immediately adjacent to the site, undergoing expensive alterations (at rate payer's expense) in an attempt to accommodate the traffic and to provide parking for those visiting the hotel the area at peak traffic times, is an unmitigated disaster that must eventually produce a serious accident.

The hotel does not even provide parking for its staff or overnight visitors let alone patrons and has virtually no provision for delivery trucks to unload which then have to further exacerbate the traffic problems by unloading in the street.

The reported comments of someone at the hotel indicating the people of Patonga will rue the day they chose to oppose the expansion of the site and that the hotel will probably be bought by a large corporation which will be unsympathetic to the needs of the people of Patonga are amazing.

Similarly the same person's prediction that the new owner will fill the pub with poker machines is, in a word, bizarre and only indicates that the whole place is in essence a blight on what was one of the last unspoilt and most beautiful parts of the entire Central Coast.

Email, Aug 26, 2016

Vic Jefferies, St Huberts Island