Property Council supports Tauranga City Council’s direction

11 April 2016

Property Council supports Tauranga City Council’s direction for the year

Property Council believes Tauranga City Council’s draft Annual Plan 2016/17 is well aligned with the council’s adopted Long Term Plan 2015-2025, following its submission.

Bay of Plenty Branch President Andrew Collins says Tauranga’s property sector is in a buoyant state currently, which means all involved need to be nimble, efficient and responsive to change. 

“We are seeking visionary leadership, infrastructure provision timed to meet the needs of a growing city, equitable and transparent development contributions, efficient building consent and resource consent processes, and a collaborative approach to working through issues with the council. By and large, the draft Annual Plan delivers this.”

The Branch supports the proposed funding of the Civic Spaces project to ensure that options to reinvigorate Tauranga’s CBD are robustly evaluated.

“It’s exciting to see the possibilities currently being explored by the council. We like the idea of creating a central Project Management Office to bring more consistency, efficiency and timeliness to the design and delivery process for council projects.”

Property Council also supports the development of online processes to make the processing of building consents and resource consents more efficient. 

“The development industry has been frustrated with recent delays in getting subdivision and building approvals through the current system. The saying that ‘time is money’ is very true, particularly when a lot of money has been invested in a project. So council’s efforts to address this through an investment in information and communications technology and online processing should be applauded”.

There are a number of changes to the development contributions payable in the city’s different urban growth areas, with some increases and decreases. Property Council understands this is caused by a number of factors such as changes to infrastructure plans and timing as well as revised actual and estimated project costs.

“They key is to have a transparent and equitable development contributions process, which we acknowledge has long been a feature of the council’s DCs policy. That’s why we don’t take this for granted as some other councils around the country lack this transparency.”

One concern expressed in Property Council’s submission relates to ongoing increases to commercial rates under the guise of ‘economic development’.

“All of council’s economic development initiatives are paid for by commercial ratepayers, not residential ratepayers. This policy was adopted in the Long Term Plan just last year so we’re not seeking to revisit this. 

“However, we believe commercial ratepayers shouldn’t be saddled with the costs of an ever-increasing number of economic development initiatives that benefit the city more generally.

“Many commercial landowners are facing significant costs for seismic upgrading projects, amongst other things, and we believe that commercial rates increases should be kept to the minimum necessary.”

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