infonews.co.nz
INDEX
BUILDING

PlanSmart gets Praise from Local Governments Harshest Critic

Friday 31 July 2009, 9:33AM

By Hastings District Council

315 views

HASTINGS

Local Government Minister Rodney Hide has applauded a Hastings District Council initiative to speed up the building consent process.

In his speech to the Local Government New Zealand conference in Christchurch earlier this week, Minister Hide praised Hastings District Council for introducing a system to speed up the processing of building consent applications.

The Council introduced PlanSmart, a system to simplify the application process and reduce waiting times for approval, in April this year.

PlanSmart requires applicants to complete a checklist before they submit their building consent application, and have the application reviewed by an officer.

Mayor Lawrence Yule said in the past, council accepted applications of varying quality, which slowed the process down as many applications would be suspended until missing information was supplied.

“The consent process does not give us too many options for dealing with incomplete applications, so if we get people to sit down with a PlanSmart officer before they submit their application, we can make sure it’s in a form we can proceed with.”

Homeworx designer Don Kelland was the first industry professional to go through PlanSmart and says it will make applying easier for both experienced applicants and new-comers.

“My PlanSmart meeting raised some issues about the site we were building on that we weren’t aware of. Without PlanSmart we would have had delays further down the track,” Mr Kelland says.