Major amendments to Redland City Plan to protect native wildlife

Division one councillor Wendy Boglary said she had pushed for wildlife corridors on a larger scale across the Redlands in the City Plan for eight years and was "gutted" the project had been "watered down".

The council will pursue the amendment aimed at improving statutory land use planning protections identified in Council's Wildlife Connections Plan 2018-2028.

Cr Talty said the amendment proposed applied to more than 1000 private properties and 18000 public properties already within the urban footprint of Shaping SEQ with local and state environmental values.

"These amendments will ensure that native vegetation clearing in the city's most important urban habitat and connecting wildlife corridors are mapped in City Plan through a new category of Matters of Local Environmental Significance (MLES) and would be subject to a higher level of regulation," Cr Talty said.

"This will ensure all native vegetation clearing in these important urban habitats and corridors would be assessable against the environmental significance overlay of City Plan."

Cr Boglary said the plans had not been adopted the same way they were initially planned after the council moved an amendment for the motion for the corridor to only include urban areas in 2020.

"The disappointing thing was when this got adopted in 2018, it was about getting this whole document with protection over every corridor across our entire city into the city plan, but it's just been watered down to our urban areas," she said.

"I'm extremely concerned about the true commitment to Redlands' future and the sustainability of our environment, which is what everyone moves here for.

"I'm gutted that it has been watered down this much and the potential of Redlands is never seen."

Cr Boglary said Cr Talty and Cr Edwards drove the change, and her attempts to establish wildlife corridors across the city were squashed.

"With the Olympics coming, people aren't coming here to see our architecture. They're coming to see the natural wonders of Redlands." Cr Boglary said.

"You know we want tourism here and this is what our tourism is. It's unique and we've got such potential to shine in southeast Queensland."

Cr Talty said the amendment also proposed new assessment criteria to require clearing to avoid native vegetation within mapped MLES wildlife core and corridor habitat.

"Where this is not reasonably possible, the clearing will need to be minimised and mitigated, and an offset provided for any unavoidable loss of native vegetation," she said.

She said the amendment would update mapped Matters of State Environmental Significance in the City Plan to reflect changes to state mapping since the plan began in 2018.

Cr Boglary said mapping had been verified and areas where habitat and been cleared and had no value was removed.

Planning Minister Steven Miles will consider the plan through a statutory State Interest Review and Council will post updated information on the Your Say website.

The community can submit comments on the proposed changes through a public consultation process alongside the information on the changes on the site.