You've seen the TV handymen and, of course, you can do it. You can renovate your home, your castle. Well, no, you can't. The rules are baffling - even for the experts. Joseph Barratt tries to explain
SOMETHING STRANGE is happening inside an old villa in one of Auckland's wealthier suburbs. Big sheets and blankets cover the windows.
Neighbours notice people coming and going throughout the day.
They know who the new owner is. He's the man who looks, shiftily, to either side as he approaches the front door. He turns the key and carefully opens the door to reveal . . . a building site. Workhorses, hammers, saws and ladders. Workers. Just like any other site. So why the secrecy?
Tired of long delays, fed up with the paper trail through Auckland City Council's bureaucracy, the owners have gone ahead and begun renovating their new home, their castle, without official, signed consent.
They bought the rundown house six months ago. Like thousands of other couples around the city, they planned to do it up and move straight from their old place into the newly gentrified one.
They mailed their consent application to the council allowing plenty of time for the plans to be approved and the work done, and put their old home on the market. It sold with a settlement date several months into the future. Weeks passed. Three months. Still no consent on the property they'd bought.
Already running behind schedule, the builders, who'd signed contracts and turned down other work, were getting antsy. It was now or never: the couple decided to start work anyway. "We know of a lot of people who have had to do the same thing." they told The Aucklander.
"Some who know what it's like dealing with all the drama are not even bothering to apply. If it's smaller, inside work - like moving a wall - then they are just doing the work [without consent]."
Family are arriving from overseas for Christmas. The celebrations were supposed to be at the couple's new place. Instead, it's looking likely the homeowners will still be staying with friends and the visitors will have to find somewhere else.
JULIAN MATTHEWS knows why people might be tempted to rip into jobs around the house without getting the red tape unravelled.
The Waihekian is handy with a hammer. A year ago, Mr Matthews decided his carport was not quite big enough to get out of his car comfortably. So he decided to to widen the floor.
He describes it as a minor job - moving three foundation posts 1.2m. "There are some pretty simple formulas for working out if it will be enough to support the weight."
He was required to get an engineer's report - KACHING! $200 - and to pay for council officers to inspect the site twice.
"I doubt the total time associated with this job - including checking plans, lodging paperwork and site inspections - exceeded two hours. For this I was charged about $850. "That's the sort of fee I would expect to pay for a senior partner at a law firm.
"Consent was 50 per cent of the cost of the entire project and it slowed the whole thing down."
ALL OF AUCKLAND'S councils record fewer applications for building consents and say the vast majority are processed well within the statutory time frame of 20 days.
However, Lance Herbst, of Herbst Architects, says that overview is not necessarily accurate.
"Statutory obligation is to have it done within 20 days. But the first thing they do is send a letter back, saying they are experiencing high demand so it will take 40 days. Then they generally request additional information.
"Every time they request something else they stop the clock. Requesting information is an easy way of stretching the time out.
"If you came in to see me, I would say, for a resource consent, allow a minimum of three months up to about six. That's for a straightforward project. If it's complicated you will be in for a year. No doubt."
Citing the problem as a constantly changing building code, he has sympathy for council staff.
"The speed with which the building code has been changing makes it impossible for councils to educate their staff fast enough. The rules are changing faster then they can cope with."
Mr Herbst's experiences have largely been with North Shore and Auckland City Councils but he's done some work in the Waikato. The provincial councils, he says, were the best he has dealt with.
DELAYS IN smaller projects inconvenience and cost individuals; businesses have also been hit.
The Aucklander spoke to one developer who didn't want to be named for fear of jeoardising future business going through the council. He reckons consent delays have cost him a lot.
He planned to get consent to convert a building into 12 apartments. During the process, he decided to sell the property with consent for the development.
A buyer was prepared to pay $4 million on condition that consent was through by September 2007. It wasn't rubber-stamped until December and the sale fell through.
Almost 18 months has elapsed since he applied for the consent. The developer pointed out to Auckland City Council that its planner had originally told his company there was no need to publicly notify the project.
Six months later, council officials changed their minds and said he needed to.
During that period the developer also had to pay for geotechnical reports to satisfy a council objection - which was later retracted.
After the sale fell through and the developer was left with a large loss, the council sent him a bill of $13,340 for the outstanding amount owed for the consent. The accounting included a "democracy services hearing" fee of more than $6000, a hearing for which none of the objectors turned up.
"Considering that we were within the rules, it was pretty frustrating. We could build 11 units by right but the council has discretion to allow for up to 13. We wanted to build 12.
"We didn' breach any boundaries. It should only have taken 3-6 months. Now we can't even get $800,000 for the building."
It was poor consolation that after the developer objected to the bill the council eventually agreed to reduce it to $2783.
Ian McCormick, the council's manager of building control, says that consents stretching that long are not common.
"We tend to actively discourage consent applications from progressing for more than 12 months. This is because the building code and infrastructure changes over time. What may have been acceptable at one time may not be in a year's time. So we would need to be reprocessing plan details over and over."
ON THE North Shore, Donald Fairley has had plenty of dramas over fixing a leaky roof. A structural engineer of 20 years, he thought there would be no problem. His interpretation was that he was replacing the corroded aluminium roof with a similar, though higher specification, material and did not require consent.
"I thought I could do the work under the 'replace a like with like' provision. It wasn't like I was putting people into a slum apartment. I was fixing it. It wasn't healthy under current conditions."
He started the project and was soon issued a "notice to fix" requiring him to stop work on the roof.
Mr Fairley admits he ignored the notice at first.
"I got sent a stopwork order by the North Shore City Council but I ignored that. If the councils were always right, there wouldn't be leaky buildings in the first place."
He was sent a court injunction. "Then I stopped doing work." After going through the courts for two years, Mr Fairley was last week fined $33,646 including court costs. It includes a $10-a-day charge since the stopwork order was issued.
Says Mr Fairley: "It's a bit unfair seeing it wasn't me that took so long to go through the courts."
David Frith, the North Shore council's team leader for compliance and monitoring, says the offences under the Building Act 2004 were at the relatively high end of the scale.
"Mr Fairley was adding a second storey to his property without obtaining a building consent. He refused to obtain a consent when he was asked and failed to comply with a 'notice to fix'. In the end, the council had to obtain an interim injunction in order to halt the work," says Mr Frith.
"The building consent process helps to ensure that buildings in our city are safe, sanitary and structurally sound. With no building consent and no inspections, there is no assurance to the community that a building is safe and fit for its intended purpose."
BACK AT the villa across the bridge, work goes on behind the sheeted windows. Shhh . . .
Council Consents Average wait Auckland City 7200 last financial year 25 days* Manukau 4050 last financial year 10.1 days North Shore 3431 last 12 months 18 days Waitakere 1687 so far this year 10 working days * includes ''time waiting for additional information'' Source: Councils
Can we fix it? The problem, industry experts tellThe Aucklander, stems from the 2004 Building Act, introduced in response to the leaky building problem. The comprehensive new legislation might have been well intended. But it's so complex that it slows everything down, says Irene Clarke, manager of environment and regulations for the Local Government Association, the umbrella body for the country's councils. There are so many clauses, sub-clauses, ifs, buts and maybes, that few industry experts or council employees can tell at a glance what a project requires to inch its way through the process. "Often what we find is that the delays are not with the councils themselves but with experts they have to use, or individuals not knowing how much information they need to supply. It's not just sitting in a council building," says Mrs Clarke. More education is needed. Applicants, builders, building experts and council workers all have to be up-to-date on the extra requirements. However, she hopes it could be fixed soon "The last government was just beginning to realise there was a problem and was looking at it, and now the new one is also talking of making changes to the Act. "Its hard to pinpoint one problem with it. The problem is that the Act is so complex. When they look at reforming the law, it needs to be looked at as a whole and not necessarily the individual aspects of it."
WHEN IS A BUILDING CONSENT REQUIRED? The Building Act sets out certain work that does not require a building consent. However, all work must be done to meet standards set by the Building Code. Basic building, such as laying a patio or installing kitchen cupboards, does not require a building consent. Most building work, however, does. The lists below provide a summary, but check with your local council to be sure. Plumbing and drainage are likely to require a building consent. Some earthworks may also require a building consent or other approvals. DOES require a building consent: ?Structural building additions, alterations, repiling, demolition ?Plumbing and drainage (except repair and maintenance of existing using comparable components) ?Relocating a building ?Installing a woodburner or air-conditioning system ?Retaining walls higher than 1.5m ?Fences or walls higher than 2m, and all swimming pools and their associated fences ?Decks, platforms or bridges more than 1m above ground level ?Sheds greater than 10sqmin floor area DOESNOTrequire a building consent: ?A patio or deck at ground level ?Garden trellis less than 2m high ?Maintenance of your house, for example, replacing spouting or a piece of weatherboard ?Building a small garden shed (provided it is no closer than its own height to the boundary, is under 10sqmand less than one storey high) www.dbh.govt.nz.govt.nz
Rage of Consent
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