July 6th, 2025Planning issues around landfill

A group of Daylesford residents are calling on Hepburn Shire Council to resolve issues around the former landfill and transfer station in Ajax Road.
The group, who asked not to be individually named, said the issue had been “festering for more than five years with the council failing to resolve it despite a number of promises”.
“During Covid restrictions in 2020 Hepburn Council exhibited Amendment C80 to its Planning Scheme with many items across the shire. Hidden away in the detail was a proposal to force in a 500-metre buffer around the Daylesford Transfer Station which would prohibit or severely restrict any new housing being built or renovations taking place.”
The main reason from the council was that there could be methane gases coming out of the former Daylesford landfill which was closed in 2004 and capped with a clay base.
Eventually the council abandoned the buffer but last year exhibited a draft Structure Plan for Daylesford which proposed to again introduce the buffer. Later in the year the council planners introduced a requirement that anyone wanting to build within 500 metres needed to engage consultants to check their property for methane gas.
The group believes that there are no issues with the former landfill and/or transfer station but if there are the council is legally liable to address these rather than attempting to penalise residents.
“We estimate that the council has spent much more than $100,000 on several messy failures to honestly progress and resolve this. It could have been resolved at least three years ago if the council had any commitment to working with the community on this issue.
“In 2024, the council engaged another environmental consultancy firm which again stated, in December, that testing for methane gases should be conducted and that they had not received adequate information from the council.”
Earlier this year the group engaged town planning lawyers who advised the council they were not following proper process and had failed to gather evidence.
Council CEO Bradley Thomas then wrote to the group that the council had identified the need for further work including gas monitoring and testing would start in mid-April with the results to be publicly available and reported to the EPA.
The group says testing did not happen, rather a desk-top analysis was conducted, but it did not provide enough information including council reports that the landfill had been capped with clay exceeding EPA guidelines.
“The affected residents have had enough of the council dishonouring undertakings, misleading us and treating us as they have stated, as ‘confused’.”
Mr Thomas told The Local he had been meeting with the group of concerned residents, and after the final testing currently underway, everything would be finalised within 12 months.
He said, in hindsight, it had “probably dragged on for too long and I’d agree with that”.
But Mr Thomas said the council was working now to finalise the issue “once and for all”. “To do that we need to do some testing like gas monitoring to have a really clear picture that there’s no health and safety risks or anything like that. And then we won’t need to put a buffer in or change any of the planning rules around the transfer station.
“When the landfill closed down, it was appropriately capped, so there are no problems. We’re not expecting any significant works, we just need to finalise the testing and then we can work through a process and there is nothing that is happening there that we didn’t expect. That’s a good outcome. We’ve got no evidence that anything’s wrong.”
Mr Thomas said the issue was raised five years ago when the council was working on the structure plan and a Development Design Overlay led to the 500-metre buffer around the transfer station.
“It’s really the flow-on from that. In hindsight, we should probably have got the testing done, moved forward and put a line in the sand on it a bit quicker. I think in hindsight, if I had my time again, we’d probably do the testing (then).
“We just had some other projects that had a greater priority. You can’t do everything at once.”

Words: Donna Kelly