After meeting with city council staff on Friday, the club made a formal request for more time - something which may have to go back to a council vote.

The racing club has formed a working party with Eastern Maar Aboriginal Group and last month engaged consultants to redo the Coastal Heritage Management Plan to suit access to Levys Beach via Spooky's car park.

New racing club chief executive officer Tom O'Connor said the process had been long and complex, and there was still more work to do which couldn't be completed by November 30.

That means horses will effectively be off beaches in the south-west for three months from next weekend while the racing industry continues to try and push ahead with its plans to get them back on Levys Beach year-round via Spooky's car park as soon as possible.

Horse trainers have been off Levys Beach for about three years now, and the November 30 deadline not only applied to stopping trainers using Levys Beach car park but also getting documentation done for Spooky's car park.

With the work involved in getting the appropriate approvals for what would have been a short-term access option via Levys car park, the racing club had instead turned its sole focus to the long-term option of Spooky's car park which is 200 metres further west.

Opponents like Bill Yates say the horses on beaches issue is like "trying to put a square peg in a round hole". "They've been trying to find ways around this whole thing and they keep running into roadblocks the whole way along," he said.

While you will still see horses swimming in the ocean outside Warrnambool's pavillion, they will be off Lady Bay during the peak summer tourist season from November 30 until March 1.

There are 19 trainers who pay $250 a year for access to Lady Bay where a maximum of 50 horses are allowed to train on the sand while up to 66 more can swim in the ocean there, the council says.

Some horses also still have access to Killarney beach with historical agreements giving a small number of trainers a lifelong right to keep using it.

Mr O'Connor said having beach access for horse trainers gave the area a point of difference for trainers.

Without it, Warrnambool is no different to other tracks across the state which have grass, sand, fibre and a swimming pool, he said.

"It's about the future of this industry. At the moment it might seem we have a reasonable number, but it only takes one or two to drop away and we'd jeopardise the facilities out here," he said.

And there are trainers that had already left the area to go elsewhere, Mr O'Connor said. And since the departure of disqualified trainer Darren Weir, the number of horses in the area had gone down, he said.

The industry, Mr O'Connor said, was important to the region with studies showing it generated more than $97 million in the area, employed more than 950 people full-time with almost 4500 involved as employees, volunteers or participants.

He said the process to get horses back on Levys beach was very complex with the amount of users involved, but the club had started to tick off the boxes.

The plan was to allow up to 120 horses access to Levys Beach and up to 40 in the sand dunes of Hoon Hill.

"The key groups are Eastern Maar and the updated Cultural Heritage Management Plan and Warrnambool City Council given that the car park itself and the trails are on their land," Mr O'Connor said.

"The existing access via Levys Beach car park was part of Parks Victoria land, and with the minister having made a decision that Spooky's was a safer option, it has moved the responsibility onto Warrnambool City Council land."

If the club gets the OK from council to continue the process it has started, it will then need to return to the council with completed documentation to seek a permit.

Mr O'Connor said the club had been working with Eastern Maar on a monitoring plan and response plan for the sand dunes which were "constantly evolving and changing on a daily basis".

"If access is granted back I think there's some strong documentation to be able to have access in a responsible respectful manner," he said.

"There's so many bits and pieces happening that eventually it will all just get pulled together. It's hard to put a timeline on everything."

However, Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation chair Jason Mifsud said a decision on getting horses back on beaches would be made "sooner rather than later" but there would be no "rush to any particular decisions".

The top priority for the corporation was to protect cultural heritage, and there would be "no compromise" on that, Mr Mifsud said.

A month ago the corporation made a decision to become more proactive around having that conversation with the racing industry, he said.

Mr Mifsud said they spent an afternoon walking through the dunes and talking about what the process to protect cultural heritage would look like, as well as working through the relevant state government requirements for Eastern Maar to support a Cultural Heritage Management Plan.

"One of the anomalies in this whole process is Eastern Maar is fundamentally locked out of that process by state government policy," he said.

"But through really honest discussions and emerging relationship with the Warrnambool Racing Club, the heritage consultants and Aboriginal Victoria have agreed to make sure Eastern Maar has a voice and can inform and ensure that our values are embedded in that Cultural Heritage Management Plan.

"We're not anti-horse training on the beaches, but we are anti-damage to cultural heritage.

"There's a range of complexities within that given that sand dunes do shift, further heritage is exposed.

"We'll maintain an open dialogue to work out a resolution that supports our own interests but also the potential interests of the racing community."

Mr Mifsud said the outlier in the whole issue was recreational use. "And that's a provision that we need to think our way through without it becoming overly emotional or over political," he said.

He said there was a whole set of rules for commercial horse trainers in regards to regulation, times and monitoring for use of the dunes, but for motorbike riders, recreational horse riders and other casual users of the dunes it was "somewhat more difficult".

He said protecting the heritage of their ancestors for future generations was at the heart of the issue.

"We want to be pragmatic without compromising cultural heritage," he said.

One box that needs to be ticked off before the horses can return is for Cr Mike Neoh to engage with user groups, and he said that hadn't happened yet.

"I was delegated the task of liaising with stakeholders around the use of Levys post November, but given the race club hasn't initiated anything with us, I haven't been able to go out and engage," he said.

"We've said it's up to the club to initiate not council. I kept saying this and I've said it a million times, there's a step there where I need to engage with stakeholders before council will sign any permits. The club and the community and everyone needs to hear that loud and clear.

"If they think it's just a simple case of council rubber stamping, they're not on the same wavelength."

For about four years the Belfast Coastal Reserve Action Group has been opposed to horses on beaches for environmental reasons, public safety and its cultural heritage.

Spokesman Bill Yates said the group had contacted the office of new council chief executive officer Peter Schneider three times about the issue but had not received a reply.

"It's very disappointing because our group was probably the reason we ended up with the development of a management plan," Mr Yates said.

He said the group would oppose horses on Levys beach wholeheartedly and they wouldn't be the only ones.

He said landcare groups and the boardriders club would add their voices of opposition.

While he acknowledged there were horses on beaches elsewhere in Victoria, he said it was not on the scale of what's proposed here and not in as environmentally sensitive areas with cultural heritage issues.

He said there were "prophecies of doom and gloom" for the local racing industry if the horses were off beaches, but none of them had come true and the industry was thriving.

Mr Yates said there were a few horse trainers on Killarney beach now but "nothing like it was when this all blew up and we're not having 80 to 100 horses trampling all over everything".

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