Bunbury Visitor Centre to have two homes for next year

The Bunbury Visitor Centre will have two homes for the next 12 months in the latest chapter of the tourism hub’s location saga.

Councillors on Tuesday night voted to have the centre temporarily split its operations between the CBD-based Bunbury Museum & Heritage Centre and the Dolphin Discovery Centre at Koombana Bay Foreshore.

It comes after backlash from the council’s previous decision to move it to Koombana Bay resulted in a special electors’ meeting being called last month and a motion put forward to defer the final call.

The original plan was to temporarily relocate the facility to the popular beach, while investigating the feasibility of using the heritage listed Old Railway Station as a potential future location.

Despite two locations being chosen for the next year, Bunbury Mayor Jaysen Miguel emphasised it was not going to be used as a trial to redetermine which location is better.

“The simplistic thing is that right now, the council decision which has now been deferred for 12 months, was unlikely to have been enacted in terms of in the next six months to get what was proposed as transportable,” he said.

“In essence, we would have been maintaining its presence in our admin building, which it has been for some time now.

“We’re not going to get to the end of the 12-month period and say there were numbers here and numbers here and base the decision on that.

“It’s about a temporary location to gather more information.

“If we refer back to the initial report, which we have been basing our decisions on, that actually indicated that having a number of locations or multiple locations is generally a very good thing.

“Looking forward to just getting through this one, implementing that and starting to see our visitors getting continued service.”