VISIONS of a beautified and unified Walter Road have caused Bedford business owners to push for part of Dianella to join the City of Bayswater.
Business owner Connie Sciullo said the stretch of Walter Road that straddled Bedford and Dianella was “no man’s land”, with half of the road managed by the City of Stirling and half by the City of Bayswater.
She started a petition for both sides of Walter Road and streets behind up to Alexander Drive – including about 20 businesses – to be amalgamated into Bayswater.
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“Walter Road is a main road… as people are coming in to Bayswater, they’re looking at shops that need to be fixed, they’re looking at derelict blocks,” she said.
“You want to come into an area and see things match, things complement each other.
“As the road is divided, we can’t beautify both sides of the road.”
Ms Sciullo said there were several empty shopfronts and blocks in the area and beautification was needed to “achieve a uniform, harmonious environment”.
She recently applied for a $20,000 grant to install 3D art in the area, which was rejected.
Bayswater Mayor Barry McKenna said the City was open to working with Stirling on the street and already did with mosquito control, road works and spatial mapping.
He said a parcel of Dianella joining Bayswater was a possibility and he was happy to recently welcome Noranda from the City of Swan.
“Noranda set a precedent for community-led changes, so all things are possible if they tick the right boxes,” he said.
“We’d really need to look at what is being proposed and what the implications are before we could make a decision about any further boundary changes; there’s a lot of work involved and it requires a lot of resources to do these things piecemeal.
“We’d want to know how many households and businesses, what area would be covered and what the financial implications for the City and our ratepayers would be.”
Cr McKenna said the Local Government Advisory Board would have to recommend the boundary change and the Local Government Minister support it.
He said the State Government’s promise of local government reform and boundary change left a lot of “legacy issues” and he suspected this issue was one.
The City of Stirling refused to comment, but is considering a proposal to rezone a Dianella industrial precinct from industry to residential.