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**Davo36** · 18-08-2009, 09:40 AM

Yep. I decided to get the planner guy because dealing with the council is so frustrating and I thought it would help smooth the waters. I'm not sure it is really.

For one thing, I think the council just kind of see him as the enemy and also he is starting to come up with reasons/issues that are slowing me down instead of making things plain sailing. We may have to part ways shortly.

David

**Tan** · 18-08-2009, 10:05 AM

I'd have a casual chat with the guy you are using and try to see if this is just a glitch, and he will be great in the long run. Now you have more idea what you are working with, ask what he has done in this situation in the past.

It is a real problem that the council guys don't seem to like him. The whole point is to form a good relationship & work with them. The Council seem to have the ability to suddenly turn very helpful if they are rubbed the right way by the right person, in stark contrast to the opposite.

If it doesn't work out, it would be worth asking the Council for a few suggestions on who to use. They can't make recommendations as a rule, but you may be able to wangle an idea out of them - maybe ask who they most often deal with and watch their faces!

**Davo36** · 18-08-2009, 11:16 AM

Tan, I think you're right, I'll give him a ring this morning.

I thought I'd post some more pictures, so people can more easily see what I'm talking about.

Here is the proposed ground floor level:

As you can see, there's space for a shop on the left hand corner. This is the main corner of the road. It's around 150 m2. I'd really like to have a restaurant or cafe in there. The rest of the ground floor area is garaging. You enter at the back and drive right through and exit onto Queen St. I have 7 car parks shown to comply with the council's parking radii etc. but you can get 9 in there. The cross hatched area is a pedestrian crossing so people can park their car and walk up the stairs to their apartment.

And here's the upper level layout for the apartments:

The picture is pretty small, so hard to see but the 3 apartments left part of the property are 2 bedrooms and the 3 on the right are 1 bedrooms. Nice 2m wide hallway leading to a lobby area where I'll have some seating and then that links to the stairwell which exits out onto Queen St.

You can see the balconies sticking out from the building line and into the awning area. I was surprised they let me do this as they're over the footpath, but I'm glad it can be done as it makes things so much nicer I reckon.

David

**Davo36** · 18-08-2009, 11:45 AM

Right, had a talk with the planner, sorted things out.

What we are going to do is go for a Certificate of Compliance. To get this, we fill out a form, going through each of the council's rules, and stating why we comply with them. If they agree, the provide us with a certificate stating that the activitiy complies with the rules and so we don't need resource consent.

For this I need a couple more drawings (elevations etc.) and the acoustics engineer's report.

Once we get this (if we get it) then we can just go straight to getting building consent. I'd need full construction drawings, fire engineer's report and all the other guff for that.

David

PC · 18-08-2009, 02:36 PM

"The council can't turn around and say...."

Yeah right! LOL!

Any way... Alarm phone line delays - does anyone do one with a connection to one of the mobile networks?
No delay problems there.
Just set it up to send a text: UR BN RBD BRO!

**Davo36** · 19-08-2009, 10:26 PM

Development Contributions

For those who don't know, development contributions are amounts of money that councils charge when you develop property. The idea is that by building more units (residential or commercial) you are adding to the amount of infrastructure (sewers, stormwater, roads etc.) that the council has to provide. So you have to pay to upgrade these - even if the money you pay just goes into a black hole and the infastructure is not actually upgraded.

Apparently the local government act allows councils to charge in this way. How much? Well that's the 64 million dollar question. It's up to the council to decide and they all do it differently.

These fees are in addition to reserve contributions which have been around for much longer.

Right, so I spoke to my planner guy today and asked him a number of questions:

1)How is the amount to pay decided?
2)When will it be decided? I’d like to know fairly early on so that I can see what the feasibility of this project is. The costs are mounting up and so I’d like to know what this fee will be before doing much more.
3)Is the fee based on whether I keep the building as one title or split it up into units? For now I am going to keep the building in one title (actually it’s 2 now, so I guess it would stay as 2). But I might decide to sell it off in say 5-10 years time. Would more development contributions have to be paid at that time? I know reserve contributions would.

He rang me back and this to say:

He rang the council and spoke to the people who do this sort of thing. He asked "How do you calculate how much has to be paid? Do you have a formula you use?" The answer was along the long of "No we don't have a formula, we use logic." My guy said "So logically I guess you look at what services have been paid for in the past and then look at what services will be required by this development in the future, you subtract one from the other and that's how much has to be paid???". He was told it's not that simple... but on further discussion, this is the sort of idea they will be following.

Basically what they are going to do tomorrow is look at the proposal and try and decide how much extra burden will be put on the cities services and so how much will have to be paid. They will of course also be thinking to themselves, "I wonder how much we can get away with charging this bloke before he cries foul?" And of course I am wanting an amount that is very low because it's all basically bollocks anyway! It's just dead money to me, pure cost, no benefit whatsoever.

So I have to wait until the end of tomorrow (or later if they take longer) to see how much they want to charge me. And I really have no idea other than the standard fee when you add another house to a site that already has a house is $13k. I'm adding 6 apartments and one shop. I guess there was one shop already, do maybe they will try and ping me for 6x$13k = $78k. In which case I'd tell them to go f**k themselves and leave the building as an eyesore.

The only other thing I have to go on is that my father built a brand new building with a shop and 4 apartments above it 3 years ago and got charged $3600 in development contributions. But apparently they review these charges each year and they have gone up.

So that answers the first 2 questions: 1) As much as they can get away with and tomorrow.

The answer to the third question is that it doesn't matter if they are on separate titles or all on 1 title. It's all based on usage. So even though I have 2 titles, they will treat it as one building and just look at the increase in usage. Well looking on the bright side, at least they don't charge more for separate units!

So there we are, I'll have to just wait and see. I hate being beholding to them but there's nothing I can do. I will post back with the decision as soon as I can.

David

**Xav** · 19-08-2009, 11:07 PM

Sounds right to me Davo.

I'm surprised they don't have a better defined way of doing it though. IIRC, here in Chch they charge based on the Household Unit Equivalent (HUE) of the development.

They assess the development contribution down into component parts (amount of drainage, water consumption etc) and compare each to the average for a household unit. There is a set price per HUE for each.

So if you are going to be using twice as much water as the average household unit you have a HUE of 2x for water. It is quite good because it means you can have your own engineers assess it before hand and work out what the contributions will be.

**Davo36** · 20-08-2009, 09:05 AM

Yeah I think it's a similar thing in Papakura Xav. I just didn't go into that much detail in my post. I have been sent something called a property level report which has come from the council. the first part is basically a plan of services and the second part contains info on the breakdown of development contributions into their component areas:

DEVELOPMENT CONTRIBUTIONS POLICY DATA IS PROVIDED FOR
INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS ISSUED SUBJECT TO CONFIRMATION
THROUGH FORMAL ASSESSMENT OF ANY PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT
Planning Zone: 39.01
Roading Local Catchment: Roading Urban
Roading Local CatchmentRate: $ 366
Roading District Wide Rate: $ 2967
Public Transport Rate: $ 14
Stormwater Catchment: Stormwater Papakura Central
Stormwater Catchment Rate: $ 4916
Stormwater District Wide Rate: $ 173
Community Infrastructure Rate: $ 2841
Water and Wastewater
Catchment: Urban Water
Water and Wastewater Rate: $ 2183
Total Rate Per Unit of Demand: $ 13460

So around $3333 for roading, $5k for stormwater, $2800 for 'community infrastructure' and $2200 for water.

Now with my project the roof is staying the same so I'll be able to argue that the stormwater situation is not changing so that should save $5k per unit.

I don't really see why I should pay anything for roading either. I'm providing parking which the property has never had before which saves usage on the council parking at the rear. I'm also going to have to pay a crossing fee and then pay for the development of the crossing. Also, there will be less people travelling to the property than there was when it was the council library.

There will also be a certain 'credit' for the wastewater that the property has been producing up until now. It has 5 toilets, 5 handbasins and 3 lunchrooms, so they must count for something.

Now community infrastructure is a funny one, they must mean things other than the above. So I can't see how I can argue against this.

So if I'm very lucky I might get away with say $3k to $4k per unit i.e. around $24k depending on how many units they nab me for.

David

**Davo36** · 21-08-2009, 09:55 AM

OK, so I have the answer. For six apartments and one shop with garaging they want $23,700.

Here's the email from the council guy showing his calculations:

Development contribution as a commercial building is based on 185m2 per development unit. So you can calculate that based on the total floor area.
For the development each unit over 60 m2 is one development unit and each one under 60m2 is a half development unit. The retail area is commercial and is still 185m2 per development unit. There is no development unit impact through adding the decks. The only issue is the effects of the garage space. I do not know how the garages are allocated but the garage floor area is part of the house unit floor area.

470m2 X2/185 being 5.1Development units for the existing site.

Proposed
155m2 commercial /185 being .84 development unit
Assuming all the units are over 60m2 when the garage area is included 6 Development units

Thus 6.84 Development units from the original 5.1 Development units giving an increase of 1.74 units of $13640 each or $23733 more or less.

Final assessment at the time of building consent or land use application.

Dxxxx Rxxxxxx
Development Engineer

Seems all pretty arbitrary to me. Like he could have done this any number of ways and come up with any figure between $5k and $100k really.

In some ways I'm glad that they didn't ask for $50k or more. But then comparing this to the development my father did 3 years ago, which was a new building, 4 apartments and 1 shop (bigger than mine) and look at his development contribution of $3600, I wonder why I'm paying 6.5 times as much when I have an existing building??!!

Not sure if I'm going to appeal this or on what grounds. Will think about it for a few days I think.

Any comments/ideas appreciated.

**Perry** · 21-08-2009, 10:05 AM

What does your 'planner guy' have to
say about the 'think of a number, and
multiply by the Mayor's birthday, add
last weeks paycheck . . . ' calculations?

**Davo36** · 21-08-2009, 10:17 AM

Perry, I have asked him via email. I'll let you know after I have spoken to him! Maye it's like this: We need $x for the Christmas party this year, $y for alcohol, $z for the slush fund, therefore the fee is $w!

**Perry** · 21-08-2009, 10:39 AM

Your Dad's era effort must've been
a low-key party, then.

**Tan** · 21-08-2009, 11:03 AM