Citizen COFA. Not!

In the classic film Citizen Kane, flashbacks illuminating the source of the magnate's cruel and domineering life led to a boyhood sled named Rosebud. So, too, the woes of residents Vs COFA trucks can be traced back to a seemingly insignificant item – a paper store.

I kid you not. A paper store.

The roots of the present-day truck route fiasco date back to the early 1990s, shortly after UNSW took over the Paddington site from the small art school that was there. Here the seeds of COFA's persistent 'truckulence' were sown.

On vacant land facing Paddington's Victoria Barracks, where once stood a corseted row of Victorian terrace houses, the university built the bleak industrial monolith known as Block F - a building with all the charm of a Bhopal insecticide factory. At that time the consent authority was South Sydney Council.

As the Campus was plonk on the edge of a vulnerable heritage area, South Sydney Council put certain conditions into the development consent - namely that all large vehicles had to enter and exit the campus in a forward direction, away from heritage residential streets.

This would have seen all loading and unloading done within the "curtilage" of university grounds, ensuring residents and the university could all go about their daily business in a sharing, caring and mutually responsible manner.

But it wasn't to be. When COFA built the misery that is Block F, it decided it would disregard the conditions because it wanted to add an open carpark, an office and, yes, that can't-live-without-it paper store, thus rendering its Greens Road vehicle access woefully inadequate.

Council wasn't happy and ordered that COFA delete the additions from their plans. Council stated that failure to abide by these conditions would "injure the amenity of the neighbourhood, emit noise and vibration, creating traffic hazard and congestion, and would not be in the public interest".

But COFA went ahead regardless. With a two-finger salute, COFA claimed that, as a NSW State Authority, it didn't have to obey the Council's consent conditions. It must have wanted that paper store real bad.

Instead, access to the major Oxford Street state arterial road and the Greens Road collector road fronting the campus was blocked by blank grey walls, security grilles and derisory vehicle access facilities.

Snubbing the consent authority, COFA wilfully failed to address transport, traffic, sustainability and amenity impacts caused by the ever-growing intensification of its enlarged campus and the many-fold increase in student enrolments.

As a result, the escalating multiplication of service, delivery, visitor, student, transport and traffic impacts at the residential rear of the Campus has severely impacted upon hundreds of houses in what is one of Paddington's tiniest heritage conservation precincts.

This is why we get all those long articulated and rigid trucks, and gargantuan coaches loading and unloading in tiny heritage streets, and weaving up and around the block to get in and out. And this is what COFA is - again - attempting to do with their construction trucking.

20 years on, and COFA is back to its old tricks.

Locals are faced with the prospect of a conga line of thousands of dirty great trucks being funnelled through residential streets. All so that COFA doesn't have to wear the disturbance inside their campus. And because a paper store meant more to COFA than people.

COFA is, once again, defiantly refusing to build that Greens Road access into their campus as they promised both consent authorities and residents, because residential impacts are immaterial in COFA's expedient world.

Come on COFA. Play nice and get your act together. You've got a $48 million windfall in public purse stimulus funding for your shiny new campus. How about putting a tiny fraction of that into making amends with your neighbours for past misdeeds. Create the promised access on Greens Road for your big redevelopment. It's not too much to ask. Surely.