The City of Gold Coast plans a 70-staff depot on a Miami park, with residents only discovering it after four local consultations that never revealed the full plan, writes Carole Richard.
IN FEBRUARY 2026, residents of Miami on the Gold Coast noticed small signs in their local Frank Murray Park announcing a proposal to build a council operations depot on the site. What followed was a community campaign that has grown steadily since. But the story of how we got here is as much about process as it is about a park.
The City of Gold Coast is proposing to construct a satellite depot on Frank Murray Park — a community green space at the end of Sonia Street in Miami with a children's playground, mature eucalyptus canopy and protected wildlife. The depot would house approximately 70 staff, a fenced vehicle compound and 38 car parks on a street roughly seven metres wide.
Aussie Kids Kindergarten, catering for 74 children aged six weeks to five years, sits directly adjacent at 4 Rope Court. No traffic impact assessment, flora and fauna study, acoustic report or arborist assessment has been published.
None of this is what makes the story unusual. What makes it unusual is the four separate community consultations the Council ran in the same neighbourhood across 12 months, none of which, individually, revealed the complete picture.
The consultations that never quite connected
In February 2025, the Council publicly consulted on the Miami Creative Industries Precinct. As part of that process, the existing Ozone Parade depot was described in the Council's own consultation materials as ‘surplus to the City's needs’. No replacement site was mentioned. The Council had already built a $21.2 million replacement depot at Coomera.
Between October and November 2025, the Council ran the Pizzey Park Master Plan consultation. Pizzey Park sits directly adjacent to Frank Murray Park. More than 1,332 residents gave feedback about what they wanted to see in the area. No mention was made of a proposed depot next door.
In November 2025, the Council released its Urban Forest Strategic Plan for community feedback, surveying residents on how to expand urban tree canopy, protect biodiversity and improve green cover across the city. At the time, the Council had already identified Frank Murray Park as the preferred site for a new depot, meaning mature trees on the site were already earmarked for removal.
In February 2026, the depot proposal was finally revealed via small signs in the park, with minimal public promotion compared to prior consultations. The community survey notification letter was titled ‘Notification of proposed upgrade’ and stated the Council ‘is undertaking works to construct’, language that treated the outcome as settled before submissions had closed.
Viewed together, the sequence of consultations gave residents no opportunity to respond to the full picture. Each one was technically legitimate in isolation. Together, they ensured the community never had the chance to push back on the complete proposal.
The strategy that condemns the proposal
What gives the campaign its legal and policy weight is the Council's own adopted Our Natural City Strategy 2032, a framework that explicitly commits to protecting urban green space, maintaining critical nature corridors and consolidating development on already-disturbed land rather than parkland.
The strategy was the result of extensive community consultation, in which ‘Naturally Unique’ was voted the number one priority by residents out of six Council Plan themes, and 96 per cent of stakeholders rated the natural environment as ‘very to extremely important’.
The proposal to build a depot on Frank Murray Park sits in direct conflict with multiple actions in that strategy and with Mayor Tom Tate's own public commitment that ‘at the heart of our lifestyle is preserving our green and open space’ and the Council's own tree management policy, which states that ‘tree removal is a last resort’. (You can read more about Tom Tate's Gold Coast corruption with IA's ongoing Tate Town investigation.)
Residents have also noted a double standard in how the Council justified the other four sites under the same LGID26 depot program. Tugun was approved on the basis of ‘already disturbed land’; Carrara as ‘expanding existing rather than establishing a new facility elsewhere’; Benowa and Coombabah on the basis of ‘established use’; Miami, a functioning community park, fails every criterion the Council applied to the other four sites.
What the community is asking
The campaign, coordinated through the Save Frank Murray Park Facebook group, is asking the Council to withdraw the current proposal, publish all required impact assessments and conduct a transparent site selection process that applies the same criteria used for every other depot in the program. Residents are also asking for a single, integrated consultation that presents the full neighbourhood picture, so that what happened this time cannot happen again.
Frank Murray Park was named in 1977 after Frank Murray, a Gold Coast construction supervisor who, from 1948, helped build the Coolangatta Airfield, the Little Nerang Dam access road, and the original Miami Works Depot. The same depot is now being vacated for the Creative Industries Precinct.
The community named a park after the man who built that depot. The Council now proposes to turn that park into a new one.
Community submissions are open until 27 March at gchaveyoursay.com.au/lgid26/surveys/miamilgid26.
All the facts are available at https://savefrankmurraypark.com/.
Carole Richard is a Gold Coast resident and member of the Save Frank Murray Park community campaign.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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