The news was revealed during the council meeting, Wednesday, February 1 after discussion started on a motion by councillor Mitchell Nadin in which he sought to improve council’s forward planning and planning processes generally.

In his background statement to the motion, Cr Nadin said that over the period 2012-16 council had identified Bega and Pambula sport grounds as regional sports facilities and commissioned landscape design firm Spiire to produce master plans for each site.

He said that the second stage was to produce detailed plans for each facility to ensure the projects were shovel ready and fully costed and also wanted council to prioritise urgent works on either site with community consultation.

In speaking to his motion for council to activate funding to begin detailed plans for Bega Sports Ground and Pambula Sporting Complex and review the projects' priority schedule and scale, he expressed concern over what had taken place so far with the Spiire plans and questioned talk of a basketball centre in Bega when there was no basketball competition there.

Cr Nadin was keen to see a staged implementation of works adopted by council so that the community had a better understanding of what to expect and so that the sporting community got the things it needed as a priority.

“Let’s do it once and do it right,” he said and added that the sooner we moved to reviewing master plans the sooner council could identify the staged work and priorities.

Speaking after the council meeting, director community, relations and leisure, Anthony Basford said the money was in this year’s budget for the next stage.

“We have the money allocated to engage designers for the next phase. We are about to go out to tender. Invitations to tender should be out by March and we’re hoping to pick a designer quickly,” Mr Basford said.

He added that sports ground users, clubs and 355 committees would all need to be part of the process.