COMMUNITY SPORT
By LIAM DURKIN
BAW Baw Shire Council and Trafalgar Recreation Reserve user groups are continuing to advocate for the construction of a second oval in the town.
A new double-sided multi-use pavilion (named after local family the Turra’s) was recently opened at the Trafalgar Recreation Reserve.
The current facility services soccer and boxing, but football and cricket cannot operate because their designated changerooms are located on the side currently facing a paddock.
While the construction of a second oval is not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’, it is the ‘when’ Baw Baw Shire and the Trafalgar Football-Netball Club and Trafalgar Cricket Club are trying to expedite.
Baw Baw Shire East Ward councillors Darren Wallace, Peter Kostos and Mayor Michael Leaney met on site recently at the Turra Pavilion with shire recreation staff and representatives from the football and cricket club to discuss the way forward.
Mayor Leaney said the oval would provide a great boost for the Trafalgar township.
“The development of the new oval is part of the master plan for the recreation reserve, now that we have built the Turra Pavilion, which is a great facility, we now need to move onto building and creating the oval to match it,” he said.
“Some people said it was a bit out-of-sync (building a pavilion without an oval) but of course when the opportunity arose to build this pavilion we took it, and now it gives us great leverage to get the money to develop this oval.
“It is not going to happen overnight, it is going to cost about $4 million to get the whole project done, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of drainage and lifting the land to do it right.”
The benefits of the new oval will be far reaching, most notably in alleviating foot traffic during winter and providing capacity for a long-awaited turf wicket in summer.
Currently, the Trafalgar Recreation Reserve football ground is reduced to a mud pit within a matter of weeks once the season starts, as senior and junior football use the ground most days of the week.
The Trafalgar Cricket Club has also faced an uphill battle in its bid to get a turf wicket, with its A Grade team needing to travel away every week to play matches on grass.
While there is growing impatience among user groups to see the second oval come to fruition, Leaney said there was more to construction than just bringing in excavators and graders.
“Initially we actually need to do the planning for this. We have some very high level plans in terms of the master plan but we actually need to do some detailed plans,” he said.
“For this kind of facility it would cost between $200,000 and $400,000 to develop that, so the planning is the first structure that needs to be done, once the plans are done we can go off to government and hopefully get the money needed to create it.
“The oval is certainly not forgotten about, the mere fact that we’ve invested a lot of money into developing the Turra Pavilion means it is not forgotten about.
“It was important that part of that master plan incorporated this building to be the central hub of the recreation reserve. We weren’t just going to build a small facility to suit the soccer club, it was about creating something, planning for the future. This is a case where we actually have built for the future, now we need the oval.”
There are a number of factors that should make the task of construction easier, not least the fact Baw Baw Shire own the land on which the oval will be built.
“We are lucky that we were granted this land by the Turra family, it is in councils ownership, it is not like we have to purchase land,” Leaney said.
“We have the ability to expand it – that is not the issue. It will need a fair amount of work to be built to a high standard, we need drainage and car parking, we don’t want to do something that is underdone, we want to get it right.
“One of the advantages Trafalgar has is it is flat. In Warragul and Drouin we have a number of master plans in play for development of various recreation reserves but in some ways they are constrained because a lot of them are in valleys, they have streams running through them, whereas we have great open space around Trafalgar that really makes it easy to put in these facilities.
“This will be a fabulous facility, all we need now is the money and support from the state and federal government to make it happen. It is certainly what I will be aiming and my fellow Councillors will be aiming for.”
Given Trafalgar is now the third biggest town in Baw Baw, it would appear vital there is appropriate infrastructure to support the growing population, which will only increase once more people move into The Range subdivision.
With a state and federal election looming, Trafalgar cricketers and footballers will surely be waiting with baited breath to see if any election promises are made in relation to a commitment for the oval.
Ultimately, as the second oval looks like being a simple case of dollars and cents there is of course one more option – surely there is a rich farmer up in the hills with a spare $4 million.
