Perth Voice Interactive

LOCALS are already so contorted and steamed up about traffic and parking issues related to the popular Bikram Yoga in North Perth that Vincent council has refused to allow an expansion next door.

Council planning staff supported the application but CEO John Giorgi stepped in to advise the council it should refuse it.

He says under the town planning scheme the council must “protect and enhance the health, safety and physical welfare of the city’s inhabitants and the social, physical and cultural environment”.

A half-dozen Chelmsford Road locals had fronted the council to complain about being completely parked out.

‘I was personally shocked, I had never seen anything like that in all my days’

One gent said his elderly mother couldn’t leave her house in the afternoon because the street was so densely packed with cars, the gap so narrow that wing mirrors are routinely clipped off.

“The amenity of our neighbourhood has been severely affected,” Ross Field told councillors.

“Yesterday I arrived home at 4.45pm, yet I was not able to access our street and my driveway until 8pm.”

Sixty-three formal complaints were lodged over the past year.

Gym owner Mark Burns—a councillor at neighbouring Subiaco—regards Mr Giorgi’s intervention as “extraordinary”.

“I have 30 years of planning experience, both here and in the US, and when the agenda came out and I saw the CEO had lined through the recommendation from the planning department I was personally shocked, I had never seen anything like that in all my days,” he told the Voice.

“I contacted four separate town planners in Perth to ask them if they’d ever heard of such a thing and all four of them—high level planners running businesses in WA—every one of them stated they’d never seen it.

“This has turned into a political matter: Our application, as proven by a town planner in their now-crossed out recommendation of approval, is fully compliant.”

Mr Giorgi told the council he felt, “quite strongly that we can win this at the SAT”.

The council also voted to implement a one-hour parking limit in the street (yoga classes run 90 minutes), and to ban parking along one side to ease the squeeze.

There was some concern that’d just push things one street over, so it’ll be reviewed in three months.

Cr Matt Buckels, a transport guru, says restrictions may be required on several streets before yogis get the message they should park at a public carpark and walk to their fitness class.

by DAVID BELL