It is indeed encouraging to read in The Council Quarterly that Planners at Council have introduced some “simple changes’ which have resulted in Development Applications being processed more efficiently.
Mr Gow’s quoted statistics however, are at the surface misleading:
“Last year the median time for a DA was 43 days and early this year it was 34 days.”
This in fact means that for last year, 50 per cent of DAs took 43 days or less to process and 50 per cent took longer than 43 days, but how much longer? In our case, 13 months (approx 390 days) longer! Furthermore the majority of those DAs are for erecting signs, putting up solar panels, adding a deck to an existing dwelling or building a garage, (none of which should take anything like 43 days to process) with about one sixth of the applications being for new dwellings.
In January 2011 we sought consultation with Council Planning staff to discuss our DA .We were told we would have to complete a waste disposable survey, a vegetation survey and a koala survey and that everything else was in order. These surveys were completed and our DA submitted. After 90 days and repeated excuses but no progress on our DA we demanded some information and from there the nightmare began. We finally had our DA approved in February 2012.
No Council staffer was able to pull up GIS data for our property as is now evidently the case, in fact we had to research and provide Council with GIS information related to positions of Crown Road reserves, neighbouring property boundaries and the legal status of the 1.2km existing road leading to our front gate, all of which Council should have known about.
On top of this we had to make submissions for changes to the unreasonable, “tick a box’ conditions in the current DCP and eventually provide council with an $85,000 bond until legal procedures to purchase the road are completed. The same road is okay for the other two properties using it and for us to drive in and out on every day to carry out our cattle business, but we cannot under the current DCP use it if we build a house on our property!
This process is necessary so that we don’t have to pay for change to an intersection 1.2km from our front gate which Council should have paid attention to more than 30 years ago, has accepted for more than 30 years but under the current DCP can make us now personally responsible for.
While I welcome the changes Council has now made I can hardly wait to see the “further improvements’ the planners have up their sleeves and can only wonder why these obvious and “simple changes’ have not been made previously.
Jan Kleeman,
Armidale
