Developers lodge plans for massive Black Hill industrial estates

Central Coast company The Stevens Group and joint-venture partner Hunter Land have lodged a development application with Newcastle City Council to subdivide 183 hectares of industrial land on the corner of the M1 and John Renshaw Drive.

The $88 million staged development includes 200 industrial lots on a bushland site formerly owned by Coal and Allied.

The neighbouring development site is even bigger, covering two thirds of a 300-hectare site owned by the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

Diocese chief executive officer Sean Scanlon said the church was negotiating with a buyer and would lodge a subdivision DA with Cessnock City Council in the next four weeks.

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The sites, to be developed independently, will exceed the combined size of the nearby Beresfield and Thornton industrial estates.

Mr Scanlon said the future land owner wanted to build large lots to house distribution centres which could no longer be accommodated in Sydney.  

Stevens Group director Brett Harrod said the Black Hill-Beresfield precinct was becoming the “central hub of industrial activity for the Hunter”.

“The amount of residential development in the area, it should satisfy employment for that really growing population through there,” he said.

He said the catalyst for the project was a lack of developed industrial land in the Lower Hunter. 

The Newcastle Herald reported last year that the Department of Planning had rezoned the adjacent church-owned land, between Black Hill Road and John Renshaw Drive, from rural to industrial after five years of opposition from nearby residents. 

​The diocese bought the 300-hectare former Steggles poultry farm for $6 million in 2003 to build a high school before changing plans. The rezoning set aside a third of the site for rural living and environmental conservation.

The Department of Planning approved the rezoning of the neighbouring 183 hectares in 2013. Under that deal, Coal and Allied dedicated 147 hectares for state conservation land at the nearby Tank Paddock and 398 hectares at Stockrington.

Colliers’ marketing of the then Coal and Allied land in 2014 described it as one of the largest freehold subdivision sites in NSW.

Black Hill Environment Protection Group’s Terry Lewin said residents would study the subdivision DAs to make sure the proponents were honouring commitments made during the rezoning process, including maintaining an effective buffer along Black Hill Road.

“The obvious problem is protecting the integrity of the Black Hill area, which is a semi-rural area,” he said.

He acknowledged that the Tank Paddock and Stockrington conservation lands were a valuable offset against allowing industrial development on the former Coal and Allied site and residential development near Minmi.

“The big positive thing that’s happening is the Stockrington State Conservation Area’s now been established and the Richmond Vale Rail Trail is close to going on public exhibition,” he said. 

“The people in Black Hill are going to suffer from an industrial development. The people in Minmi are going to suffer from an encroachment of all the housing and everything else. 

“The community will have to weigh up are we getting the long-term benefits as an offset to these. They potentially do. The time frame for those is probably very long.

“In a way the people in Minmi and Black Hill are sacrificing some of their lifestyles for a greater good, but that greater good won’t be realised in the lifetime of the people who have been affected.”  

Mr Harrod said the Stevens Group site had “very strong” landscaping conditions.

“It’s industrial land, so obviously there’s going to be factories there and there’s going to be trucks there,” he said. “But we will do everything we can to make sure the area looks and feels like a nice and clean industrial environment.”

He said the mooted M1 extension to Raymond Terrace was essential to cater for the area’s industrial growth.

“Anything that can happen to improve traffic to and from the port, to and from the north and south and out west is only going to be of benefit to everybody who wants to relocate their businesses there,” he said. “And it’s going to be of benefit to the region, because it will drag employment into that location.”

He said a major service station chain was locked in for the site.