Every year, Wollongong City Council squirrels away thousands of dollars to create the city's own version of New York's Central Park.
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The latest council budget released earlier this year includes a column marked "MacCabe Park Development" and every year for the next five years it will drop $150,000 into that fund.
At the start of the 2022 financial year, the balance was $1.7 million and by 2026 it will be $2.4 million.
But what's it for?
The restricted reserve - meaning it can only be spent on one specific purpose - is to buy up property along the edges of MacCabe Park.
"As land becomes available we hopefully will have the funds to buy those properties," Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery said.
"In the meantime the ones that we have acquired are being used or leased, so there is an income stream coming from them but inevitably MacCabe Park will become like the Central Park of the city.
"That whole block will inevitably be consolidated and will be the city centre park."
Some of this has already taken place; in the south-eastern corner of the park once stood the Vox FM building and a boarding house - both of which were owned by council.
Both had reached the end of their use-by dates, so council demolished them and opened up that corner of the park.
Council also owns other properties, including the old Integral Energy building on the corner of Burelli and Church streets, now in use by council staff.
That will be a difficult building to demolish due to the presence of an underground substation.
Cr Bradbery said the "Central Park" plan wouldn't happen quickly, with a long-term possibility of council compulsorily acquiring the last few properties.
"The point of the exercise is to slowly acquire those properties," he said.
"We're just waiting for the opportunity and if we get sufficient funds for those properties. We also have the right for compulsory acquisition if and when we get a critical mass of properties and then that triggers the consolidation."
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