Wodonga Hills: the plan beyond the trail

From the town, the hills look like one continuous backdrop. On paper, they never were.

The 2017 Planning for the Wodonga Hills strategy covered a six-hill study area, but it came with five separate masterplans: Bears, Federation, Huon, Klings and Mahers. They did not promise the same thing. Huon Hill was to be Wodonga’s leading hills tourism destination. Mahers was deliberately held “in reserve”. Klings was a mixed-tenure landscape shared across Council and Crown land. Bears’ future depended in part on land Council did not yet manage.

That matters because the most visible result of the strategy is on Klings Hill: La Cabra, the mountain-bike loop opened in November 2020. It is a real piece of delivery, and the only adopted action that Council’s current Hills page clearly records as completed. It is not, however, the only Hills-related work documented elsewhere in the public record: Council’s 2021–22 budget records $70,000 for Huon Hill lookout improvements. The located record does not establish which 2017 action, if any, that work completed. Council’s current hills page lists three prioritised actions — all three from the Klings Hill masterplan. It lists none from Federation, Bears, Mahers or Huon.

That is not proof that nothing else happened. It is a statement about what Council has made visible. The distinction is important, and it runs through this case.

Much of the land that makes up the Wodonga hills entered public ownership in 2000. By 2017, Council had a complex landscape to manage: bushland and viewpoints, tracks and fire risk, residential edges and growing demand for recreation. Some land was Council-managed; some was Crown land, with roles for DELWP and Parklands Albury Wodonga. The strategy itself said Council did not have the capacity to carry out all of its more resource-intensive actions “in the foreseeable future”. Delivery would depend on budgets, grants and other priorities.

“the council does not have the capacity to undertake all of these, more resource-intensive, management actions in the foreseeable future”Planning for the Wodonga Hills Strategy, adopted 16 October 2017

On 16 October 2017, Council adopted seven documents together: the overarching strategy, its engagement report and five masterplans. The package contained 135 actions: 90 tied to the five individual hills and 45 applying across them. None of the masterplans contained a costed implementation program.

Council also went beyond its officers’ recommendation. It required formal agreements with hilltop user groups, and directed that the strategy be reviewed every three years.

The plan’s aim was ambitious but restrained: to make the hills enjoyable, sustainable and accessible while protecting biodiversity, cultural heritage and scenic values. It did not simply draw tracks and car parks. It dealt with the bushfire interface, maintenance, access for less-mobile visitors, habitat, user conflict and the pressure of housing moving closer to the hills.

The differences between sites were stark. Huon’s plan had 29 actions — almost a third of the whole site-specific program — and anticipated the hill eventually being surrounded by housing. Mahers had 11 actions and a caution of its own: a possible former wartime rifle range should be confirmed before major increases in public access. Bears, Huon and Mahers each expressly deferred parts of their longer-term opportunity plans to a later planning stage.

The strategy was not adopted quietly. Its consultation record is unusually detailed, though inconveniently preserved in an image-only PDF rather than an easily searchable public document.

The first exhibition opened in July 2016. More than 100 people attended a community meeting at The Cube. There were drop-in sessions, online discussion, workshops run by an independent facilitator and, by the final exhibition in 2017, 208 submissions from 196 submitters.

The process was also contested. In August 2017 Council reduced the final exhibition period from the six weeks officers recommended to four weeks, by a 5–2 vote. The petition record was not one-sided: a 523-signature petition against the strategy was presented in September 2016; an August 2017 petition with 183 signatures opposed impacts at residential interfaces; and an October petition opposing further development had 198 signatories, with 23 more received before the meeting. At that same October meeting, Council also received a separate 663-signature petition supporting an environmentally sustainable walking and mountain-bike trail network. Council resolved that the two October petitions would be considered as public feedback on the strategy.

The public did not speak with one voice. Klings Hill attracted the most submissions and the most support. Federation Hill had the highest proportion of outright objections. Across 305 coded comments, access was the largest theme; safety, bushfire risk, neighbourhood amenity, maintenance and funding were all recurring concerns.

But the record also shows that feedback changed the documents. Council’s engagement report lists 15 specific amendments. Proposed car parking at Bears Hill’s Donnington Drive was removed. A number of proposed vehicle-access and walking-track opportunities at Klings and Federation were deleted or reduced. Existing-infrastructure maintenance was given explicit preference before new projects. The eighth strategy objective — Aboriginal cultural heritage values — was added after feedback from Aboriginal Victoria and a local Wodonga Aboriginal reference group.

That last point needs care. The adopted strategy says compliance with the Aboriginal Heritage Act is paramount before works and says Traditional Owners and local Aboriginal people should lead interpretation wherever possible. Yet none of the 90 site-specific masterplan actions is a cultural-heritage action, and Council’s current web page presents seven principles rather than the adopted eight; the stand-alone Aboriginal cultural-heritage objective is absent. The public page’s omission does not undo the consultation or the adopted commitment. It does make the difference between the formal strategy and the present public summary visible.

Council set up a Wodonga Hills Advisory Group in 2018. Its work soon exposed a quiet but consequential distinction: whether priorities were a delivery program, or simply material to be considered through the annual budget.

In April 2019, Council declined to receive the group’s interim report as officers proposed. It required another meeting with a quorum and an updated report. When the report returned in June, officers recommended that its priority table be used as the basis upon which the strategy’s actions were implemented.

Council adopted different wording. The table would be used as the basis upon which actions were “reviewed by Council in line with the budget process”, with any decision on taking over Crown land to return to Council. The resolution passed 4–2.

It is not a semantic quibble. The first formulation points toward a schedule of works; the second puts the priorities into the yearly competition for money. That approach was consistent with the strategy’s own warning about capacity, but it left the public without a costed program or a clear way to follow each action from adoption to delivery.

In August 2019 Council made about $311,000 available for priority works and for the design and completion of the Klings Hill climb track. The vote was tied 3–3 and carried on the chair’s casting vote. The resolution required the works to be complete by 30 June 2020, subject to approvals and agreements with Parklands Albury Wodonga and DELWP.

La Cabra opened five months after that deadline, in November 2020. It corresponds to Klings action 14. The public record does not establish whether the other two funded priority actions were completed.

The three-yearly review requirement has its own documentary trail. Council did not simply forget it.

In April 2020, against officers’ advice to review the strategy in 2023, Council brought the review forward to March–November 2021 and proposed a new committee including councillors, DELWP, the Indigenous community, CFA and Wodonga Urban Landcare Network. Ten months later, in February 2021, Council expressly deferred establishment of that committee for at least two years and required a report by the end of 2022.

That report arrived in November 2022. It did not create a committee or record a review of the strategy itself. Instead, it directed the CEO to review the Priority Action Table. A June 2023 decision on reprioritisation was delayed for a councillor workshop. In August, Council adopted 130 reprioritised actions: 54 capital works, 26 operational projects, 44 ongoing management actions and six planning and governance matters. It required them to be itemised for the Finance and Budget Delegated Committee during annual budget deliberations.

The figures describe different records, but their relationship is not fully documented. The 2017 adopted package had 135 numbered actions. The April 2019 advisory-group report said it had prioritised “approximately 140 actions as set out and adopted” in the strategy. The 2023 reprioritisation had 130. The 2019 description is not evidence that 140 actions were adopted in 2017; without the itemised 2023 register, the public record does not explain how the figures map to one another.

The missing piece is Attachment 1 to the August 2023 resolution: the actual 130-action register. It is not publicly available in the material Council has published. Without it, residents cannot see which original actions were removed, merged, delayed or retained — or whether the promised budget itemisation ever occurred.

No public record located by Wodonga Wire establishes that the strategy itself has been reviewed, despite the original three-yearly resolution. That is different from claiming Council ignored the obligation. The record shows a formal deferral, then a substitution of action-table review for strategy review.

Council’s project page is a useful, but thin, guide to the current program. It says the strategy and masterplans were adopted in October 2017, the advisory group’s recommendations went to Council in 2019, and a further review was “slated for 2021”. Its timeline ends in November 2022. It dates the priority implementation plan to 2018 in one place and 2019 in another; the Council record supports 2019.

The page lists three Klings Hill actions: collaborative land management, intersection safety works at Felltimber Creek Road and Central Management Track, and the mountain-bike loop. It does not list an action from Huon — the hill with the largest individual plan and the explicit tourism role — nor from Federation, Bears or Mahers.

The historical land-management account also needs an update. Parklands Albury Wodonga ceased trading on 15 April 2026 after its board resolved to wind up the company and appoint a liquidator. No free authoritative source located in this limited check identifies a successor manager or a transfer of its relevant Crown-land responsibilities. It cannot be assumed that Council inherited the land, management role or implementation obligations that Parklands held while it operated.

For residents, that leaves a straightforward question. Wodonga made a sophisticated plan for five very different hills and sought extensive public input before adopting it. It did not promise that every action would be delivered quickly. But nine years later, the public cannot follow the original 135 actions, the advisory group’s approximately 140-action description and the 130 reprioritised actions through one itemised record; see the annual budget treatment Council required; or identify delivery hill by hill from Council’s current project page.

The hills are still there, doing the quiet work of defining Wodonga’s edge. The plan is still there too — detailed, uncosted and only partly legible in public. The next useful act is not another broad statement of intent. It is a current, hill-by-hill account: what was delivered, what changed, what remains, who controls the land, and what the next three-year review is meant to examine.

The numbers that matter

• Documents adopted, 16 October 20177
• Original action package135: 90 site-specific + 45 overall
• April 2019 advisory-group descriptionapproximately 140 actions prioritised
• 2023 reprioritised actions130
• Final-exhibition submissions / submitters208 / 196
• October 2017 petitions221 opposing signatories (198 + 23) / 663 supporting trail network
• Specific changes made after consultation15
• August 2019 priority fundingapproximately $311,000
• Huon Hill lookout improvements recorded in 2021–22 budget$70,000
• Publicly listed current actions3, all Klings Hill
• Completed adopted action clearly shown on current project pageLa Cabra loop, November 2020

Decision distinctions

• The adopted strategy says revisions should occur periodically as circumstances change. Council’s resolution is stronger: a review every three years.
• Council formally deferred the 2021 review. The later process reviewed and reprioritised the action table; no completed strategy review has been located.
• The original 135 actions, the advisory group’s approximately 140-action description and the 2023 total of 130 are different records. The public action-by-action mapping is unavailable.
• Council does not own or control all land within the strategy area. Parklands Albury Wodonga had historical roles on Crown land but ceased trading in April 2026; no successor arrangement was established in this check.

Questions the public record cannot yet answer

• How did the original 135 actions, the April 2019 approximately 140-action description and the 2023 130-action table map to each other?
• Which 2017 action, if any, did the $70,000 Huon Hill lookout work complete?
• What work, if any, was completed on Federation, Bears, Mahers and Huon hills beyond the record identified here?
• Were the August 2023 actions itemised in annual budget reports as Council required?
• Were the formal user-group agreements required at adoption ever made?
• Was the possible Mahers Hill rifle range ever investigated before access was expanded?
• Has any part of the Four Hills Trail been built?
• Who now holds any Crown-land management role previously associated with Parklands Albury Wodonga?