By Tate Papworth
The much-talked about $60 million St Albans Leisure Centre redevelopment is no longer a top tier priority for the Brimbank council.
The council reassessed its advocacy priorities recently following the state and federal elections.
Following the review, the council produced a list of top priorities, ranked gold, silver and bronze.
The leisure centre redevelopment, once a gold priority, has been dropped to silver in favour of unemployment and jobs and projects such as the Western Rail Plan and Melbourne Airport.
Cr Margaret Giudice said the council will continue to push for funding for the centre despite the silver rating.
“We thank the state and federal governments for all their initiatives, but will continue as a council to advocate for our gold, silver and bronze initiatives here,” she said.
“They are all, in my mind, equally important as each other, it’s just that we happen to put them in some order.
“Of course it would be needless to say that we will still advocate for funding for our St Albans Leisure Centre, even though it’s been downgraded to silver, but I don’t think we’re going to stop the advocacy on that.”
The council has had little luck in securing funding for the project.
Its application for a $3 million Better Pools Grant was knocked back by the state government last November and a $5 million election promise of funding from the federal Labor Party never came to fruition after its shock election defeat.
Despite the lack of funding, the council is determined that construction on the project will begin in June 2020.
However it’s not the first time the council has set a date for works.
A report in 2017 slated construction to begin in April 2019 and to be completed in December, 2020.
That report estimated the cost of the centre to be $50 million, but that has since ballooned out to more than $60 million.
