A gleaming billboard rises from the woebegone remnants of what Tigers fans once called the Balmain Leagues Club. ''A TRUE VERTICAL VILLAGE,'' it promises, rather optimistically, to the motorists flashing by this concrete wasteland on bustling Victoria Road.
The proposed Rozelle Village became so ambitiously vertical in the dreams of its developers - 32 storeys at one point - that Airservices Australia deemed it would encroach into airspace. That plan, like several for the site, never got off the ground.
Now that the developers are in court and striving to push the leagues club into receivership, some locals fear it might spell the end for the Tigers' dreams of returning to their spiritual homeland with their own club in that new building; or doom for their 106-year-old sporting institution; or peril for the NRL's Wests Tigers.
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Other locals are wondering if they should have protested less loudly in 2008, when Leichhardt Council rezoned the club's site to allow it to rebuild at 12 storeys.
The global financial crisis soon got in the way. The club could no longer afford to run the development itself.
But then came a white knight, Benny Elias, a former Tigers and Test hooker with a plan to relieve the club of its burden. Elias, as developer, would broker a deal under which he and a partner, Double Bay real estate agent Ian Wright, would buy the club's property for $1, in return for taking on its $23.5 million debt.
The club would be guaranteed a home - which it would lease, not own - amid the new $300 million residential and retail towers. The leagues club took up temporary digs in Five Dock and Flemington Markets and borrowed millions from Rozelle Village to keep functioning, and these debts mounted while the developer's proposals kept being rejected.
In the meantime, the state had taken control of the site from the council under its Part 3A planning laws. The former Labor planning minister, Frank Sartor, would tell the Independent Commission Against Corruption in 2012 that his colleague Eddie Obeid had called to lobby for the club development. Obeid is starring at another ICAC hearing into Australian Water Holdings along with Nick Di Girolamo, a Liberal Party connection who stood down as deputy chairman of the Wests Tigers NRL club this month.
The developers' latest incarnation of Rozelle Village is 24 storeys, but it is yet to win Planning Department approval after three years. Elias is no longer a Rozelle Village director.
''This drawn-out saga must come to an end before the Tigers are forced into extinction,'' Leichhardt's Labor mayor, Darcy Byrne, said on Tuesday. He wants to sit down with Planning Minister Brad Hazzard to arrive at a development that can and should be passed. ''We also need a guarantee … that Wests Tigers will continue as an entity and that games will continue to be played at Leichhardt Oval.''
Ric Scissons co-founded the Stop the Rot campaign that kept the Tigers at the local oval. He cannot countenance the NRL ditching one of its greatest brands, the Tigers, so they might be subsumed as the Wests Magpies. ''It would be like Coke ditching Sprite.''
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/balmain-leagues-club-in-peril-over-rozelle-village-development-20140318-350ge.html#ixzz2wMpIkOWM
