District plan nearly ready

THE city’s new district plan that sets the rules affecting every property owner in the city is expected to be ready this year.

The panel considering the second generation district plan (2GP) is in a final deliberation stage after the council has undertaken five years of work developing it.

The plan is an important part of the makeup of the city, and something council staff refer to when residents or businesses apply for resource consent.

A proposed version of the plan, at 1600 pages long, came out in 2015, setting rules covering everything from flooding, landslip and tsunami threats, to the reuse of heritage buildings, residential development and the protection of rural land.

Since then, there has been a lengthy process of submissions and hearings, finishing last week. The hearings panel is made up of commissioners and four city councillors.

Deputy chairman Gary Rae said, after the end of submissions, there was just one followup public hearing planned for September 6 to September 8, a ‘‘wrapup’’ to get guidance from staff ‘‘on anything we don’t understand’’.

In the meantime, the panel was deliberating.

‘‘Once we’ve had that wrapup hearing in September, we’d like to get to the end of the process in September.’’

That would mean preliminary decisions would be ready before the end of the year.

The panel was independent of the council, so had the power to make decisions on the submissions.

The decisions would be released ‘‘in one big rush at the end’’, after which they could be challenged by submitters by lodging appeals with the Environment Court.

The council would first try settling appeals, which the court encouraged.

‘‘We expect there probably would be appeals, there’s such a wide range of matters covered,’’ Mr Rae said.

Aspects of the plan not appealed would become operative.

The timing of that would be this year, ‘‘and it should be well before the end of the year’’.

Mr Rae said he was unsure how long staff would take to finish writing the final version of the plan.

‘‘If you saw the paperwork we’ve got here, it’s unbelievable.’’

The plan had taken longer than expected as some submissions had created extra work concerning questions requiring investigation.

One such report was 750 pages long. Mr Rae said the process required a lot of reading of evidence.

‘‘The gruelling part of it is more to do with the evidence and the material we have to read and need to be fully up to speed with.’’

The hearing process had been ‘‘entertaining at times’’.

‘‘It’s not a chore to sit on the panel and listen to submitters and ask questions.

‘‘That part of it is all good.’’

david.loughrey@odt.co.nz