Council planning blowout
COGG annual report highlights a raft of issues
PLANNING application problems are plaguing the City of Greater Geelong, with the council taking longer to make decisions, failing to meet required response time frames, and spending more on the process.
The city’s 2018-19 annual report exposed the planning pains, also revealing the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) overturned or altered more than a third of council’s disputed planning decisions last financial year.
PLANNING application problems are plaguing the City of Greater Geelong, with the council taking longer to make decisions, failing to meet required response time frames, and spending more on the process.
The city’s 2018-19 annual report exposed the planning pains, also revealing the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) overturned or altered more than a third of council’s disputed planning decisions last financial year.
A series of mandatory performance reporting indicators in the report shows the impact of Geelong’s building boom on the council’s ability to deliver on statutory planning outcomes.
It took council a median time of 84 days to make a decision on planning applications in 2018-19, a 31 per cent increase on the 64-day decisionmaking time recorded in the previous 12 months.
The response time blowout saw the median time fall outside the required 60-day decision-making time frame, with report figures revealing about a third (31.5 per cent) of decisions were made outside the 60-day period in 2018-19.
The cost of council’s statutory planning service also blew out, jumping to an average of $2415 per application — an increase of 28 per cent on the previous financial year cost of $1887.
The report notes response times were impacted by “increasingly complex applications, a high number of growth area applications, and several applications that are a few years old”.
“We’ve allocated substantial extra resources to address this and the associated workload pressure it creates,” it states.
It also suggests increased costs were in line with other municipalities experiencing high growth.
“We spent more on contractors and consultants to address high workloads and strain on resources. Several new planners have also been employed recently to alleviate significant workload pressures,” it reads.
The Addy in August revealed Geelong planning applications jumped by about 20 per cent over the five years to 2017-18 to 1887 over the 12month period.
Of the city’s decisions reviewed by VCAT last financial year only 64 per cent were upheld, leaving more than a third of decisions to be overturned or altered.
The result is a decrease on the 68 per cent of decisions upheld in 2017-18, but an increase on the 61.54 per cent upheld in 2016-17.
Comments in the report note the percentage of decisions upheld by VCAT would be variable as council continued “to make decisions in the best interest of the community”.
The report notes the latest figure excluded mediated outcomes and consent orders, and that an average of 2 per cent of planning decisions were appealed at VCAT each year.