A preliminary report on Horsham Rural City Council’s recent survey on the issues the community consider important relating to a bypass was reviewed at the latest meeting of the Horsham Bypass Community Reference Group (CRG) held this week.
Mayor Cr Brian Klowss, said “the survey was open for a 6-week period from early May until mid-June, and attracted over 540 responses”.
“One of the early outcomes from the survey was the observation that 87 per cent of respondents indicated that a bypass is important for Horsham,” Cr Klowss said.
“The report presented to the CRG has started to explore the views of the community, and is identifying a broad range of issues that the CRG will be considering in its development of criteria to evaluate the impact of a Bypass on our community.”
Cr Klowss said “the survey was designed in a way so that the CRG could understand the impacts on the community based on eight geographic areas around Horsham, being four urban and four rural areas, as well as whether people are residents, business operators, farmers or other groups.”
“The report has collated the community’s responses on a range of factors including, noise, pollution, property values, cultural heritage and many more. Safety attracted the highest level of importance in the responses,” Cr Klowss said
“The community was invited to list additional factors that were important to them that might be impacted by a bypass, with some of the highest responses being in relation to protecting the river, floodplain and natural environment, avoiding the loss of farm land and impacts on peaceful rural areas”.
Cr Klowss said “the community has provided us a lot of information to understand their perspectives on a Horsham bypass which will be valuable as this planning progresses.”
“The CRG will now be seeking further analysis on the data, and aims to make the report on the survey available to the public after its next meeting in August.”
