The real story of planning a development through Woollahra Council.

After 6 months of waiting on Woollahra Council we received the final letter. There was nothing in the world that we expected to see other than “DA Approved” after all our architect had met with council dozens of times and they never asked for a single thing to be amended. In fact the planner said on multiple occasions, “there’s no issues - you should get through fine.”

We were refused. Point blank.

My architect almost had a heart attack. We were stunned. HOW? WHY? We read through the reasons for refusal and were gobsmacked - this was all stuff council had said was ok? What was going on?

This is where this story takes a twist.

Upon asking the planner who had refused the our DA he told our architect that he had been told to judge our DA in conjunction with a DA for our next door neighbour - a property which has many problems including over 10 complaints from neighbours. He verbally told my architect that our refusal was something of a ‘mistake’, and apologized profusely. They knew that they had stuffed up. Of course a severe amount of backtracking occurred at this point from various parties in council.

The net effect of several meetings is that we were asked by Woollahra Council to reapply and resubmit our DA in EXACTLY the same format. I also received written email from the senior planner that he would seek to approve our DA and expedite the process. Of course excuses were offered, but if our DA was so wrong why would they ask us to resubmit the same plans unless they had failed to assess the DA properly?

The above alone shows that something is fundamentally wrong with the DA process at this council. I have my suspicions but moving forward one has to hope that despite an extended delay the corner will turn for us.