The real story of planning a development through Woollahra Council.

If you’re thinking about submitting development applications to council, on paper they are supposed to give you a response within 42 days (6 weeks). Now I happen to know Woollahra council have just about the worst record in Australia when it comes to beating that. Several people I know who have been through council before don’t even bother waiting, they go straight to the Land and Environment court to get what they need (an expensive option and it wasn’t for us).

From their Website:
In 2006, 73% of all applications were determined with a median of 65 days.  About 20% - the more complex developments - have a median determination time of around 180 days.

After they have advertised your property for the DA (so neighbours can complain if they need to) you get assigned a case officer. This person seems largely responsible for how well things get kicked off. They are supposed to write the initial report and recommendations. If it goes well here then you’ll probably get a good ride providing all your neighbours approve.

END OF JUNE 2007:
So our DA application got off to a good start: Our humble design was met with enthusiasm from our first case officer (I will find his name and insert here). Having had a meeting with our architect the officer said something along the lines of “I can’t see any major issues here - it looks pretty straight forward.” We were pretty relieved but that was what we had expected.

Things changed quickly as we discovered a hidden bombshell not soon after. Our case officer was going on holiday for 2 MONTHS in less than 14 days!  Not to worry because on questioning he said he had 10 reports to write before he left and was very positive he would get ours done before he went on holiday as it seemed fairly straight forward.

Of course he did not deliver, nothing was done, and our DA went into some weird limbo for weeks. Very very frustrating.

It raises the following questions about Woollahra Council:

1. Why appoint a case officer to new work he cannot finish?
2. Did this case officer deliberately mislead us into believing we were in very positive territory with our application? (I will explain this later).
3. Why did Woollahra council not have a plan to deal with staff going on vacation?

Anyway, this was just the start. Council were about to put on a show that would leave me lost for words. [ to be continued ]