Residents whose homes are among the first selected by Stonnington Council from its secret list of 450 properties it wants to buy and turn into parks are outraged at the lack of transparency surrounding the process.
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Stonnington's 20-year strategy to create more parks will see property purchased where there are shortages across the council's areas.
The plan includes turning properties into parks in some of the city's most exclusive addresses in South Yarra, Toorak, Armadale, Glen Iris, Prahran and Malvern.
The council has a $28 million war-chest to buy properties for parkland, as it looks to reverse the decline in the amount of open space available in the municipality after years of intense development.
On Monday night, the council will move to ask Planning Minister Richard Wynne to place a public acquisition overlay on three Armadale properties adjacent to existing parks.
They would join a fourth Armadale property the council has already bought to turn into parkland, a three-bed Victorian family home for $1.45 million – which has sat vacant since Stonnington purchased it eight months ago.
It has also recently bought a vacant Toorak block for $1.1 million, to turn into a park, and has plans to place overlays on five industrial properties in Prahran.
Some owners of the three Armadale properties, which include a woman in her 80s, bitterly resent the plan, saying it will destroy any chance of obtaining a good price for their homes.
"This council is either totally incompetent or there is a conspiracy going on," said one homeowner, Judi Carr, a property consultant who bought her house in 2005 for $625,000.
It now has a market value around $1.2 million. Ms Carr said having a public acquisition overlay placed on it would restrict her sales options.
"I can't go to auction and get the most; I have to negotiate with council – and they have no obligation to buy," she said.
A council report listing the reasons for buying the three properties include relocating cricket nets in the adjacent park, and improving facilities for sports clubs.
At an emotional and heated public meeting at the Prahran Town Hall last week, residents affected by the prospective compulsory purchases accused the council of a dangerous level of secrecy.
A bid by The Age to get the secret list of properties released under freedom of information failed, with the council refusing it on the grounds it was protecting the personal privacy of the land owners.
Mayor Melina Sehr last week told Armadale residents affected by the public acquisition that their homes would not be forcibly acquired.
"Council is not going to come and take your property away from you, that's not what we do," she told residents. "If you make a decision to sell your property, council is interested in purchasing it ... for a fair market value, as if you had sold that property on the open market."
Former mayor and current councillor Adrian Stubbs also told residents with serious concerns about the process at Stonnington that they should take them to the planning minister and to the state corruption commission.
Cr Sehr said the public acquisition overlays would not hurt residents, saying she would not mind one over her own property as she would "not be disadvantaged in any way".
She defended keeping the list of land that the council wanted to buy secret. "It is not appropriate to identify those properties," she said.
