BUILDING WARS

Much has been made of the apparent increase of local body costs due to central government passing legislation requiring local government to carry out new and expensive tasks for which no additional revenue has been provided.

There are examples of this, but in many cases these costs do not fall on local government. Instead they are passed on directly to end users like you and me. The council then hires more bureaucrats and the associated delays and costs are then blamed on central government.

Our council has recently admitted that there are severe short-comings in timing and delivery of consents and has stated things will be fixed (by the same team that let it get like this!). While this is laudable you have to be a bit suspicious of the timing with an election due soon.

Ever wonder why a PIM (project information memorandum) is needed by FNDC before an application for a BC (building consent). Told that this was a government requirement, I waited ten weeks to get the last PIM at the direct cost of $270 plus the indirect costs of several hundred dollars, so I rang the Minister who said that it wasn’t required, so FNDC have agreed now that these two bits of paper can be applied for simultaneously. Given that the PIM only told me the colour that could be used for the house, the PIM itself is a waste of time.

FNDC also told me that a house could not be occupied until a certificate of compliance (COC) was issued, meaning that nobody could build the frame, clad it, then move in and finish the house in the sweat-equity way that my generation did. A check with the minister showed that this was not the case either and the COC is apparently only needed for sale purposes.

All this is very confusing so the Minister flew up for a meeting and, bingo we’ve now got a direct line to query silly rules from central government and silly interpretations at local government level. Silly rules abound in the building sector from compulsory extractor fans in kitchens to stop anyone dieing of the smell of bacon and eggs to sloppy rules allowing on site effluent disposal systems that just won’t work.

Hopefully we can look forward to faster simpler processes and keep up the dialogue with the Minister that should have been there years ago before FNDC allowed itself to get in such a tangle. I do hope that this is not just a ploy to fend off angry ratepayers until after the election!