Cutting down on referrals to planning panel

Proposed developments will have to attract 20 unique submissions (double the current figure of 10) before a development application to Central Coast Council will trigger the involvement of the Local Planning Panel.

Councillors voted 8-7 at the November 23 meeting to double the number of public submissions required for referral to the panel.

The five Liberals and three Team Central Coast councillors voted for the change while the five Labor and two independent councillors voted against it.

The change will need to be approved by the State Department of Planning before it is implemented.

The number of submissions is only one trigger for a DA to go to the independent planning panel.

Other triggers include proposals that are sensitive, or are above development guidelines such as height.

Deputy Mayor Doug Eaton introduced the change, saying it added two to three months to determine a DA by sending it to the LPP.

He called it a modest change.

Councillor Kyle MacGregor said it was an unnecessary change.

‘’The conversation should be around resourcing and planning powers: the State takes the power away from Council but the council staff still have to do all the work assessing the applications,” MacGregor said.

Earlier in the evening, a representative of the Woy Woy Peninsula Residents Association (PRA) addressed the topic at the Public Forum.

Peter Gillis said collecting the 10 objections required to refer a DA to the LPP was quite difficult for the community to achieve – let alone doubling it.

‘’For example, any suburban home adjacent to a developer’s proposal for a multi-storey unit block will be impacted by reduced solar access, privacy, increased traffic and noise, and the block itself will be denuded of trees; the sale value of adjacent homes will be reduced,’’ he said.

However, the difficulty in getting 10 people to lodge objections during the exhibition period was enormous, he said.

‘’Those objections will have the same basis – non-compliance issues, loss of privacy, loss of views, traffic impacts, etc,’’ Gillis said.

‘’Cr Eaton’s proposal for a minimum of 20 unique objections has no redeeming features.

‘’The objections will all be about the same issues, and could, and probably would, all be considered non-unique by the Council.

‘’The number of DAs referred to the LPP is very small – figures to March 2024 show approximately 30 referrals per year out of a total of 1600 exhibited DAs.”

Mayor Lawrie McKinna said that the majority of councillors felt it was “just too easy to block or stall things” by referring matters to the LPP with just 10 submissions.

“It was slowing the DA process down and taking longer to reach the same goal,” he said.

“It is a modest change, but requiring 20 submissions before referring to the LPP will make for a more streamlined process.”

The Council discussed the backlog of DAs during another part of the evening.

See that story here: development-assessment-times-continue-to-miss-target