LAST week’s edition of the Sentinel-Times ran an article regarding the deluge of critical comments on the ongoing streetscape works (I can’t bring myself to call them upgrades) on Commercial Street, Korumburra.
That article prompted me to drive up and down the street and I have concluded that said works and changed traffic control signs amounts to the area being intended as a CBD bypass.
Upon entering the Commercial Street and Bridge Road intersection at the top of the hill one can see a large advertising billboard that encourages traffic to drive on in an easterly direction for only 14 kilometres to Leongatha where there is a McDonalds. There tourists will find a long bay parking area with a public convenience, a free-flowing CBD with two roundabouts and a variety of supermarkets and service stations etc. all readily accessible.
I hope that Korumburra’s new CBD bypass will not further diminish the town’s availability of a variety of retail business types and their viability.
As regrettably Korumburra is now a diminutive commercial satellite to Leongatha and maybe we shall just have to live with that.
However, I think it is worth asking that every local resident looks to patronise our existing businesses, and anyone brave enough to have a go in our CBD, keeps trying to find your way to the shops we do have.
The one thing that remains ours alone is the fact that Korumburra is the first major rural town on the South Gippsland Highway, but even that may not help to capture the passing trade lost to the new CBD bypass and the McDonalds advertising.
Dennis Conn, Whitelaw
