Builders frustrated as checks delayed

Tauranga builders are frustrated at having to wait up to a week for council building inspectors to certify progress on their projects.

Difficulties faced by the council in meeting its target two-day turnaround time has forced builders into booking inspections well in advance to avoid the risk of construction being halted for long periods.

Tauranga Master Builders president Brian Foster said booking so far in advance was a bit of a stab in the dark.

His latest experience of booking an inspection happened on Thursday when he was told it would not happen until next Tuesday. "That would be considered reasonable at the moment."

Mr Foster has waited up to a week for a building inspection, and that was not uncommon in the industry, he said.

"It is not good enough. We can't operate under these conditions. Basically, building stops completely - you can't proceed without an inspection."

Master Builders and Certified Builders have had a joint meeting to try to sort the issue out, with the council freely admitting it had a problem, he said.

Council building services manager Tania Brittain said that for the most part they met the two-day target. "I do not recall a time in recent months that customers have had to wait a week for an inspection."

She said they used contract inspectors to cope with fluctuations in demand. There was one vacancy and they had recently appointed another inspector.

Mr Foster said another issue causing problems for the industry was delays in the processing of building consents. It was supposed to be a maximum 20 working days, with applications mostly lodged by designers and architects.

He said the council had told the industry that delays were often caused by a shortage of information in applications.

A Bay designer said that whenever the council asked a question about an application, the clock stopped. It meant the council could preserve the 20 days and make the statistics look better than they really were.

The designer, who spoke on condition he was not named, said some questions were pertinent and some were not. It was about grabbing a bit of time because council staff were so busy. The other reason was that the checklist for a consent had grown hugely in recent years, from about six pages to 24 pages in Tauranga.

Mrs Brittain said 75 per cent of the 1650 building consents granted in the last nine months had been within 20 working days. The average time frame for processing was 17 days and nearly two-thirds required further information.

She said the council last week introduced a new pre-application checking process to reduce the number of incomplete applications accepted for processing.