Couple question DCC process
A DUNEDIN couple say their interactions with the Dunedin City Council have left them both angry and out of pocket.
The couple are also concerned double standards are being applied when it comes to who is required to provide a disabled-accessible toilet for their business, and who is not.
Pam Warren said she and her husband, Bob, own an Andersons Bay rental property.
In April, their commercial tenant of more than 25 years, a hairdresser, retired.
The Highcliff Rd space was advertised and the couple were approached by a man who wanted to open an espresso bar at the site.
Mrs Warren said the man was told such a business would need a wheelchairaccessible toilet, but was not told this until he had been dealing with the council for two months.
‘‘Why did he not just get given a simple onepage list of ‘this is the bottom line, these are the things you will have to think about, this is what you will have to do’?’’
She said if that had been done, the proposal would have stopped at the first step.
‘‘He would have saved himself a lot of time and effort and we might be somewhere closer to having the unit retenanted.’’
The council apologised to the couple, but Mrs Warren said that did not help a situation in which she had not sought a tenant for two months ‘‘while this prospective tenant went back and forth to the council’’.
To make matters worse, she said she had visited a recently opened city cafe that did not have a disabledaccessible toilet.
She did not want to put that company out of business, ‘‘but we can’t help but think there are some double standards at work here’’.
Asked about Mrs Warren’s concerns, council community services general manager Simon Pickford said that the man who was considering opening the espresso bar had not sought professional help for an idea which was ‘‘a bit unformed’’.
‘‘We weren’t 100% clear from him what he was planning to do. We didn’t have plans; that’s where these things can, unfortunately, come unstuck.’’
But Mr Pickford said at that stage, council staff should have brought in a case manager.
‘‘We apologised to Pam for that.’’
He said case management was a free service, but was not automatically provided for initial conversations about plans because getting ‘‘10 staff round the table’’ was an expensive process.
On Mrs Warren’s concerns about the recently opened cafe that did not have a disabled-accessible toilet, Mr Pickford said such new businesses did not necessarily have to have them.
He said ‘‘for right or wrong’’, changing from a hairdresser to an espresso bar was a significant change that triggered Building Act regulations.
The city cafe had a change of use but did not trigger the government regulations that would have necessitated a disabled-accessible toilet.
His advice was that when people were looking for premises for their business, they needed to think about what it was used for and whether the new business would necessitate a change of use.
Mrs Warren said their early advice from council staff was the matter would be a simple one, and the potential tenant proceeded on that advice.
She said the level of rates she paid ‘‘entitles us to a very high level of service’’.
‘‘A high level of service is not something we have received.’’