Unitary Plan Hearings Already Into Trouble?

Written by Ben Ross - Talking Auckland

Questions around the Hearings time-frames and processes

 

Papakura North with Porchester Road-Crossgrove/Mill Roads Future Urban Zone
Papakura North with Porchester Road-Crossgrove/Mill Roads Future Urban Zone

Periodically I go and check the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel site for the latest updates as the hearings get under way for the Regional Policy Statement or RPS. Whatever the Hearing Panel decides on the RPS will bear major influence on the rest of the Unitary Plan submissions including mine around the Super Metropolitan Centre, and development controls.

I picked up in the search though here: http://www.aupihp.govt.nz/hearings/ and found a bit of extensive to-ing and throwing around Procedural Minute 10 which had a Judicial Conference last Friday. I will let you go through the Memorandum of Counsel letters below (they are all easy to read) but two points became very clear very fast:

  1. Issues around the time frame and not enough time available to the complex issues at hand
  2. No resources available per se to individuals and community groups to assist them in the Hearings

 

While we await directions from the Hearings Panel I am going to safely guess the next two years are going to get prickly and bogged down rather quickly. This is not good.

The MoC’s

 

 

 

 

Note: this particular piece got mentioned in the Herald today