Loopy rules for consents

Council is setting about removing ‘loopy’ rules in its combined district and regional plans to reduce the length of time, cost and complexity of processing resource and building consents.

“We’ve identified parts of our plans that can be better to make the consenting process easier, less expensive and less time consuming,” says planning and development group manager Nedine Thatcher-Swann.

“These include mapping errors, rules that are unnecessary or have unclear wording.”

Ms Thatcher-Swann said some were simple corrections that could be fast-tracked in time for consideration in April.

Staff would review rules that trigger the most consents to determine if they’re still applicable or relevant and identify errors with interpretation or consistency of rules.

For example the rule for building a shed or barn on Rural Zoned property less than eight hectares currently requires resource consent.

“Perhaps the rule can be changed to be permitted if there’s already an existing legal building on the property.”

“The process of changing more complex plan rules could take years and should be done on a rolling review basis. We have a different view on urban development now to ten years ago and what’s relevant now may not be relevant in future.”

‘Stop making loopy rules’ was one of the top ten fixes reported by the Government’s Rules Reduction Taskforce that undertook consultation in 2014 as part introducing reforms to the Resource Management Act.

Ms Thatcher-Swann says while there is a larger national programme of reforms to the RMA, Council are progressing these changes as our own priority.

Consent TV saves time

In 2015 Council staff set a goal of increasing the efficiency of processing resource consents.

The statutory timeframe for consents is 20 working days.

“We were meeting that deadline only 79% of the time,” says consents manager Reginal Proffit.

To improve the time it took to process applications for customer’s, staff developed the Consent TV concept of a large screen and specialised computer programme to that displayed what stage each consent application was at, in real time.

“The previous software wasn’t ideal for tracking progress and extracting data into lengthy reports was needed to gain an overview,” says Mr Proffit.

Consent TV works by accessing the database and pulling the figures and information for each application and the timelines and deadlines that need to be met.

The concept is like combining a pizza tracker and an airport arrival and departures screen.

The screen is up in the office where staff can see it and the information is continuously updating and scrolling.

“The data is colour-coded so we can easily see which consents are on track or overdue.”

Mr Proffit says staff are now meeting 97% of targets on time.

“Eventually we’d like our customers to be able to track the progress on their applications using an app or on our website.”

The system is able to be applied to other departments and councils around the country.

Gisborne District Council’s Consent TV is up for an award at this year’s Local Government Excellence Awards, thanks to the work of the consents team and acting consent manager Ian Petty who led the project.

ENDS

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