Already the new Council is showing its colours, with the decision to increase the number of development application objections required to trigger a referral to the Local Planning Panel.
The number of referrals per year is insignificant in comparison to the number of applications long hanging fire in the Council system, so the argument that this change is necessary to speed up the processing of applications is patently fatuous.
The only result of this decision will be to speed up the processing of a certain small number of applications, and it isn’t necessary to guess which ones these are, because they are obviously the worst ones – the ones that the community finds the least acceptable.
The Council action is, in effect, a move to ram through, without review, the developments that the ratepayers most affected find the most objectionable.
Since this is the Council that ratepayers just elected, we have to assume that this was the policy that the general run of residents wanted.
However, one wonders how many of them have had the experience of seeing a proposed development on an adjoining property that will adversely affect their day-to-day amenity.
I suspect that, in the next three years, some of them will get a rude shock, when they discover what their voting decision means to them personally.
With the Minister expanding the areas of high-density development on the Coast and reducing the control standards for these developments, we can expect to see an increasing number of multi-storey developments in low-density residential zones.
The likelihood that these new projects will be compatible with current environmental and lifestyle standards is zero, so anybody in one of these Ministerial target zones had better look to his defences: he won’t be able to expect much help from the Council.
Email, Dec 8
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy