Sunshine Bay’s Alistair Forde, who applied for a street-frontage carport and retrospective consent for earthworks and a retaining wall, last month told Mountain Scene council’s billing "appears to be driven by policies focused on generating revenue at the community’s expense".
"Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of oversight, transparency and accountability in the council’s practices."
Outgoing mayor Glyn Lewers promised his office would review Forde’s charges.
In correspondence between the council’s resource consents GM and Forde, the former says she’s "satisfied that the process council must legally follow has been followed, but I do think there are some costs that should not have been on-charged to you".
The GM claims Forde’s planning consultant’s first application didn’t cover basic requirements and had to be returned.
In addition, there’d been multiple changes made to the application that required multiple assessments.
When his application was resubmitted, the GM says council could have returned it again as it was "still unfortunately deficient".
However, council decided to do more work "to make things work", and it’s some of that time he was subsequently credited for.
However, Forde denies his application was deficient.
"All the professionals (architect, planner and engineer) used on my behalf agree this was a simple piece of work," he says.
However they feel the fault was the council’s interpretation of the Resource Management Act, and that face-to-face rather than email communication would have reduced costs significantly.
He feels for other applicants who’ve not challenged council’s charges.
Meanwhile, new mayor John Glover, who’s also an accommodation operator, sympathises with Forde — "all you can do is ask them to justify [the charges]".
"I’ve been through [council] processes where I’ve felt the charges were unreasonable and I’ve actually appealed them".
"And there’s one I think I got about $900 off."
