Council to target bylaw breakers

Nearly 1800 tickets were issued last month to drivers misusing bus-lanes. Photo / Brett Phibbs.

Auckland Council's tough enforcement of bus-lane and parking policies may be widened to ticketing serial breakers of bylaws.

The council is reviewing an inherited stack of 158 bylaws - controlling 32 topics from health and hygiene to animals and signs.

Regulatory committee chairman Des Morrison says the review should also look at wider use of infringements or instant fines for bylaw enforcement.

Officers serving abatement notices requiring a person to stop offending did not always bring a prompt result and could lead to court prosecution.

"Going to court takes a long time and there are legal expenses. Quite often we don't get a satisfactory outcome, certainly for the victims of the problem.

"So we are looking at going down the track of infringements to give more teeth to the bylaws.

"It's not being heavy-handed, it's just getting another tool to try to resolve issues that can take years to reconcile."

The council would have to lobby the Government for approval to widen the use of infringements, which now apply to offences under the Litter, Resource Management and Building Acts.

Mr Morrison said a resident in his district of Franklin had complained of five years of waiting for a neighbour, who kept chickens, to stop a rat infestation problem.

"The hygiene problem encroaches on neighbours, and the resident points out that serving abatement notices has not achieved anything."

Council licensing and compliance manager Carole Todd said taking a prosecution was often out of proportion to the breach and the punishment did not always fit the crime. "We could spend $15,000 taking a persistent offender to court and end up with a $200 fine."

The cost of enforcement by taking court action was brought home to the committee this week.

In a reserved decision, Environment Court judge Melanie Harland convicted and fined a North Shore courier business $18,000 for breaching the District Plan's rules for home occupations.

The council received 90 per cent of the fine from Lal's Transport, which the judge said had shown a particularly lax attitude over the years to the problems caused by parking trucks on and outside the home of company director Ramesh Lal.

In court, the council produced a petition from 13 residents of the Sunnynook street saying they had had enough of their street being taken over by the courier vehicles.

"We are faced with on-going, 24-hour commercial traffic and parking of multiple trucks and courier vans in our quiet cul-de-sac.

"This is due to the constant and increasingly cheeky disregard for the surrounding neighbours by the owner ... [who is] operating a courier post business."

Mr Lal pleaded guilty to the one charge and other charges were withdrawn by the council.

He told the court that the business had established another depot in Ellis St.