The real story of planning a development through Woollahra Council.

April 1 2008: Following an AAP meeting between Senior Planners we received approval (well not exactly, but it is a start). Ironic that the day should be April 1!

That’s 258 days since our submission.
(Average for Woollahra Council is 92 days ????)

Or looking another way…
8 months, 14 days
37 weeks
371,520 minutes
6192 hours

They argued for 40 minutes over their own ‘new’ condition that forces us to move our side boundary to a ridiculous 3 metres from the boundary of our neighbour and effectively changes the design completely. The only heart I can draw from this is that at least there are some people in council that have some decency and common sense.

They asked us to put in a Section 96 which means we can appeal and most likely have this decision reversed based on the fact that many of them believed the condition to be fundamentally unfair. In all likelihood we will have the building we first submitted being approved.

We feel relieved - at least we know we can build something.

I have no idea what council are doing. The Mayor and other senior persons in council have given me their support, but appear powerless to actually get the planners to do what they say they are going to do. Endless excuses, phone calls / emails not returned, it appears more and more that the planning department at Woollahra are a law unto themselves and even requests from the Mayor are not taken with any degree of seriousness or haste.

The more this drags on the more frustrating it gets, with no deadline, no commitment no end in sight.

So unfortunately I ended up emailing the Mayor, Geoff Rundle to highlight my frustration and desperation with council and my DA.

I was impressed. Not only did the Mayor respond personally within several hours, he followed up and responded as promised. It’s good to know that at the end of the chain there is someone who takes things seriously and doesn’t just blow hot air. He responded with dates and names and gave assurances that our case would be followed up.

Whilst calling the Mayor was a last resort, and not good use of his time in my opinion, he earned my respect.

There are some things you can do on the way. Certainly the more you log and the more you take note, the easier it is later on.

1. Make notes of all meetings.
2. Ask your architect to keep detailed notes.
3. Ask for times when the case officer anticipates receiving reports.
4. Get to know your case officer
5. Do not be afraid to ask questions and opinions
6. Call as early in the day possible to get hold of case officers
7. Get your case officers email. Ask direct questions and make sure you receive replies in writing.

Keep the Land and Environment court as a back up option for speeding up approval. It appears that Council prefer you not to go to Land and Environment court as it is expensive for them to do so. Whilst I have not been down this road I know many people who have.

It has been 12 months (almost to the day) since we (my partner and 2 young kids) bought our new house which lies under the ’shadow’ of Woollahra Council. Despite promises verbal and written we are no closer to having this DA approved

We had it refused (incorrectly) and were asked to resubmit the same plans and promised an expedited process of approval. It has still not happened.

Honesty, transparency and helpfulness should be the currency of any Council. After all don’t we pay their wages through our taxes and rates bills?

At this point in time I am planning to seek help from persons outside the planning department to help get to the bottom of this.

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.