TWEED Mayor Kevin Skinner says his council will continue to look for a site for a dirt motorcycle track, despite its decision last week to keep leasing out farmland at Eviron for cane farming.

Cr Skinner, who has been pushing for a site for dirt motocross enthusiasts, yesterday said he personally had not given up finding one.

“Not by any stretch of the imagination,” Cr Skinner said.

“I will continue to look until the day I'm not a councillor. I definitely have not given up.”

He said the council had so far investigated “three quarries, two rubbish tips and various pieces of land,” but “invariably there's somebody who lives within coo-ee”.

“These things make a fair bit of noise,” he said, “but there are plenty of areas where these kids are riding their bikes illegally and there's idiots out there who are stretching pieces of wire across dirt tracks.

“We hope to find some-where eventually.”

Councillors last week scuttled plans to further investigate lodging a development application for a motorcycle dirt track on land it owns near the Tweed Valley lawn cemetery at Eviron, used for growing sugar cane.

The decision followed a letter from the executive of the Tweed River Branch of the Cane Growers' Association which opposed the plan and complained a loss of sugar cane production land would have a “serious consequence to the viability” of the Tweed sugar industry. The letter also warned against having other people “present in the vicinity of harvesting equipment and farming machinery should the planned proposal eventuate”.

“Such a situation could lead to a possible insurance damage claim or even death,” the letter read.

It also warned “bike riders would use local cane roads and farm tracks as alternative practice facilities” and of “the need for adequate fencing of the site so that bike users do not use adjacent farmland”.