The newly completed Margaret Street car park at the TRC site is open for business, the first stage of a $40 million vision for the area from Josef Chromy’s JAC Group.
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JAC Group managing director Dean Cocker said the parking was not only for visitors to the Penny Royal Complex with an early bird rate of $8 a day for commuters working in town.
“Now we are working on proving a link between [the car park] and the Penny Royal on the old tram line,” he said.
“We are going to seal over the tram line so people will be able to walk from that car park up to the Penny Royal.”
Mr Cocker said the work for the grander vision at the TRC site had begun while the previous owner leases the property until June 30.
“We are using this time now to develop the plans for a development application to go to council for a 150-room hotel, a 500-seat conference centre and it will have restaurant and cafe type operation in it, and I would hope that we would progress that over the next few months,” he said.
“I would hope that we would have something into council by May at the latest.”
While the TRC project might seem like a step away from the Gorge, Mr Cocker was clear that the JAC Group had not forgotten about the skylift gondola.
“We’ll be designing the hotel in mind so that down that track it might be possible that the gondola could actually go into the top of the hotel, although the original application won’t rely on that,” he said. “Part of the reason for that is the political climate is such that to try and get a grant given to the council for car parking within Jubilee Gardens, which is up on the Penny Royal cliffs, [it] really isn’t conducive to asking the federal government to give the council that kind of money.
Mr Cocker estimated the cost of slip roads and car parking would be about $6 million.
“Our assessment is that it’s not necessarily something that would be easy to achieve at the next election, so we are looking to see whether or not there might be an opportunity to keep the options open in future years but also to design the hotel in such a way that if car parking in that region never becomes a possibility, that it might be possible to continue the gondola through to a rooftop bar on the top of the hotel,” he said.
“I can’t say that is what is going to happen, all I can say is that we haven’t forgotten about the gondola.”
Holly Monery
Holly Monery is a journalist for The Examiner newspaper, based in Launceston, Tasmania. Her main area of focus is local government.
Holly Monery is a journalist for The Examiner newspaper, based in Launceston, Tasmania. Her main area of focus is local government.
