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A Review of Council RMA Resource Consent Processing Performance: Round One

1 Executive Summary

2 Introduction

3 Review Methodology

4 Barriers to Performance

5 Summary of Individual Council Findings

6 Next Steps

Appendix 1: Review Questions

Appendix 2: Compliance with Statutory Time Limits

4 Barriers to Performance

We found that delays occurred for a number of reasons, the main ones being:

• acceptance of poor quality applications

• delays in gaining information from other parties

• inadequate tracking of resource consents

• challenges presented by information and communications technology

• complex planning reports and conditions for minor applications

• shortage of consent officers

• level of priority for meeting statutory timeframes.

Acceptance of poor quality applications

Good quality applications with the required information can generally be processed quickly and with less risk of mistakes. Some of the councils seemed to be accepting poor quality applications and rarely used section 88(3) to return poor quality applications at the start of the process.⁶ The councils tended to use section 92 instead to gain further information to allow processing of the application to continue.

The use of section 88(3) can be restricted as it may take longer than the five working day timeframe (in which an application can be returned to the applicant) for the application to get to the consent officer for processing. Delays in the five working day timeframe can occur while the application is lodged with the council, recorded in the electronic system and allocated to the consent officer. Councils may then use section 92 to address information inadequacies with the application.

Most public guidance on applications sets out to explain the RMA processes to a naïve audience. Most applications we reviewed were prepared by professionals (eg, consultant planners and surveyors), who already know (or should know) the basic information requirements.

Some of the councils addressed the professional audience quite actively through seminars and newsletters. The majority of the councils did not have (at least formally) any arrangements for feeding back detailed information on the quality of applications to the developer and/or the consultant communities.

Knowing what information is consistently lacking is an excellent source of feedback that professionals could use to prepare better quality applications. Good quality applications can and often do result in applications being processed more quickly.

The councils typically get applications in hard copy from the applicant. In some instances it would quicker for applicants to submit all or part of their application in electronic form to assist consent officers with extracting information to use in their reports and decisions.

Delays in gaining information from other parties

Consent officers at all the councils refer aspects of resource consent processing to other divisions of the council or to external agencies for comments and advice on specific aspects of the application. Most commonly, they pass on applications with infrastructure and engineering issues. Consent officers are therefore dependent on the level of priority/ resources other divisions of council and/or external agencies give to assessing applications.

The councils were conscious that these referrals can cause delays and the majority of the councils had set expected turnaround times for input, although these times were not always monitored carefully. The councils often sought to manage multiple referrals in parallel rather than in series.

Referrals (however well monitored or managed) inevitably use up processing time. We found the most common kind of referral was to council asset engineers. This referral process worked best where the engineers worked closely with consent officers.

Councils could face less risk and make quicker decisions if they made fewer referrals and concentrated information and responsibility more centrally in/or alongside consent officers.

A more important issue is whether many of these time consuming referrals really need to happen at all. Some applications (eg, for large subdivisions) inevitably raise complex issues about how publicly-owned infrastructure will interface with that in a subdivision as well as a range of other engineering issues that can only be dealt with by several specialist engineers.

Unnecessary referrals can often occur with less complex applications when:

• consent officers ask other council divisions or external agencies for information that they could easily find for themselves

• engineers and other specialists are handed issues that consent officers could deal with if they had the necessary information.

Referrals probably occur because consent officers and managers believe that having several specialists look at the issues will reduce risks. In many cases referrals can actually create risk because of:

• misunderstanding about where responsibility starts and stops; even if an ideal arrangement is documented there will be overlaps and gaps in these subjectively perceived scopes

• divergent views among council staff can get averaged into a result that is least offensive to the group of officers, but may not be a sound planning decision

• asset managers and other engineers do not necessarily have a detailed understanding of the decision-making frameworks that are applied to different planning situations.

Tracking of resource consents

Councils cannot manage or report on what is not measured. We consider that an effective tracking system is essential to effectively manage resource consent processing.

Generally the tracking systems of the councils reviewed captured the key dates in the process (for example, receipt date of the application, any section 92 requests, any section 37 time extensions, notification decision and final decision) and the statutory days taken to process the application. Sometimes the tracking systems recorded the days taken while an application was referred to another council division or external agency.

While most of the reviewed councils had an electronic tracking system in place that enabled some tracking of the processing of applications, the systems were not being used to their full extent to effectively manage workflow. Several councils said problems occurred because:

• ‘off the shelf’ products did not always provide adequate or accurate information; this limitation can distort the information needed for reporting purposes to councils and for MfE’s Resource Management Act Biennial Survey of Local Authorities

• a significant amount of work is needed to get the system ‘tailored’ to the councils requirements in order for good quality information to be generated and reported from the system; some councils commented that they have constructed their own parallel tracking systems (such as spreadsheets) to capture relevant processing information

• problems and delays in obtaining and coordinating the outputs from different software across the council, in particular, the financial systems

• input from other divisions of council (eg, engineers) was not often integrated into the system which again results in incomplete information being captured and reported

• inconsistent information can be entered into systems, therefore distorting the information reported.

Good information about resource consent processing performance can:

• provide political and public accountability, if reported upwards

• provide staff with clear incentives to perform, if applied downwards.

The measures used in the councils were typically built around compliance with statutory timeframes, times taken for particular tasks (eg, referrals to engineers) and appeals to the Environment Court.

There is some scope to design better measures to find out the number of times and reasons for using section 92, the actual number of days taken to process an application, variations in processing times and objective assessments of decision quality.

The amount of reporting varied significantly between the councils (for example, Taupo District and Manukau District Council regularly report through several layers of management and to council committees). Quantitative measures are also built into staff performance targets.

At Waimakariri District Council there was no reporting to the chief executive level and in the past, the council has had only two reports – one when processing times dropped markedly and a follow-up report when they improved. Staff performance at the council is assessed qualitatively.

Good measures and reporting can clearly help councils manage their processes and approve applications more quickly, but there is also a fundamental issue about what level of performance is really appropriate for a particular council, and for different kinds of applications.

At Waimakariri District Council, consent officers reported that many applicants for subdivisions in rural areas were not particularly concerned about the time taken to process their applications. Many applicants/owners were only establishing a right which they might not exercise or capitalise on for many years.

Conversely at Taupo District Council, there was strong pressure from developers to get land developed and houses built and sold. Councillors and elected members were receiving several complaints about delays in processing times because of this pressure.

These differing customer and public expectations may quite appropriately drive reporting arrangements. This may explain why Taupo District Council and Waimakariri District Council have such different approaches.

How councils apply the process

Councils’ standard processes are often designed around applications of average complexity. There is no reason why the simplest applications could not be treated much more efficiently.

All the councils had some standard steps for processing applications. They often include checklists, site visits, referrals to other council divisions and external agencies, peer review and checks by managers.

The steps are generally appropriate for applications of average complexity and may well have been designed around them. However, councils process the simplest applications through the same steps even though some of the steps may not be necessary.

For each application lodged, councils ought to be asking ‘how can this be processed as quickly as possible while adequately managing the risk of making a mistake’? If they took this approach, steps such as site visits, referrals, or managers’ reviews could often be omitted from the simplest applications.

This form of ‘risk-based’ approach is feasible. At two of the councils, consent officers meet twice a week to discuss their applications and what they proposed doing with them. Other councils had similar arrangements. These sorts of processes could be adapted so they identify the shortest plausible processing path.

Consent officers dealing with extraneous issues

We found that consent officers spend a lot of time on issues outside the core decisions needed to process minor applications. There is scope for reducing these non-core tasks and improving processing times.

Minor applications usually involve the following tasks:

• identifying elements of an activity that breach controls

• deciding who is affected

• assessing whether the effects are minor

• assessing whether the application is consistent with relevant plan policies.

Consent officers also routinely address other issues such as:

• requirements that are regulated and enforceable under other legislation (eg, vehicle crossings, water and sewer connections)

• requirements (such as telecommunications and electricity connections) that could potentially be dealt with as between vendor’s purchasers and utility operator without any attention from the council.

These issues are clearly critical to ensure large greenfield subdivisions function properly but may not need to be addressed in minor applications (eg, infill).

At Manukau City Council, the council provides a ‘full service’ to the applicant for greenfield subdivisions and developments where the engineers seek to work closely with applicants to sort out infrastructure requirements and reserve contributions as part of the consent processing. This approach results in a high level of consensus between the council and applicants but can also result in statutory timeframes being missed. However, the council believes this approach results in a better and more complete product for the customer and helps streamline the building consent process.

Councils probably deal with these unnecessary issues in minor applications so that the final resource consent (with its conditions) provides a complete picture of what the consent holder needs to do. It should be possible to communicate these (often very standard) requirements without using the consent as a vehicle.

Information and communications technology

Several of the councils reported problems and ‘lost time’ obtaining and coordinating the outputs from different software systems across the council (in particular, financial systems). Those problems may be no worse than typically found in large organisations but there is some scope for time saving if these systems were improved.

Several of the councils also reported that the software systems used are inadequate or have flaws; for example, the software may not be able to differentiate between section 37 time extensions and section 92 requests. Other systems seemed to have problems with excluding non-working days in processing times.⁷

Several of the councils had in-house Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and generally said they were useful in processing resource consents. The systems had layers for property boundaries, topography, aerial photography and some utilities. Consent officers also said they used public domain resources (in particular Google Earth).

The councils did not use software to model bulk and location, views, or sun shading though they often relied on the products of such software as presented in applications from consultant planners.

There could be significant gains from more use of software to get relevant information to consent officers therefore allowing them to do more work from their desks.

Consent officers’ reliance on paper

We found an almost universal concern among consent officers to record elements of consent processing with paper, especially by recording their dealings with applicants in correspondence. This is time-consuming and unnecessary. There could be savings of several days if they used email and the telephone for formal steps in resource consent processing.

The consent officers’ underlying concern was actually with non-repudiation; that is excluding the possibility that someone can later deny (or assert a different version of) what they or the consent officer said.

Agencies such as banks and insurance companies routinely deal with these issues in their dealings on the Internet, by email and by telephone. In many cases they do so in the face of much greater risks than local authorities face in processing resource consents.

These agencies also have archiving requirements (including the need for documents to be used in potential litigation) which are quite similar to those of councils. Again, other agencies resolve them without documenting their dealings excessively through the mail.

Complex planning reports and conditions for minor applications

In recent years there has been a significant growth in the districts near Auckland and on the coast. Many of the operative planning documents did not anticipate or adequately plan for this growth pressure and as a result variations and plan changes have been made to manage the effects.

Consent officers have needed to upskill themselves on the variations and changes to the planning documents to process applications and the assessments under the various planning documents have become more complex.

We found that consent officer reports and conditions for minor applications were long and complex, particularly in the case of Kaipara District Council and Franklin District Council. Reports often include multiple recitals of what the application is for, which plan provisions are relevant and why others do not apply.

It takes time to deal with all the written material. We looked at the time recorded by consent officers in two councils. This data suggests that minor resource consent report writing can take several hours, often over a third of the time the consent officer spends processing the entire application.

The councils do not have any processes in place to process simple applications such as a ‘quick resource consent’ process where applications can be processed in a more simplistic and faster way.

Shortage of consent officers

The majority of the councils reported difficulty in recruiting and retaining enough skilled planning staff to deal with the resource consent workload.

The problem may not be an issue with pay. Many of the councils benchmarked consent officers’ pay against public and private sector rates and emphasised the non-pay benefits of working for a local authority such as flexible working arrangements and shorter hours.

Kaipara District Council, Taupo District Council and Waimakariri District Council’s pool of consent officers was affected by receiving major applications that required indepth assessment and a large amount of coordination. Project management of these applications required commitment from senior and experienced staff over a long period, therefore taking them out of the processing pool for other applications.

Councils may have recruitment and retention problems because there is a high number of low level consent processing positions and in many instances, not everyone recruited to process applications can progress onto the much smaller number of more satisfying senior roles dealing with more complex applications. We found two interesting approaches in the councils, both of which might possibly be applied more widely:

• transferring a large part of the work often carried out by consent officers to administration staff

• using people without formal planning qualifications as consent officers.

Taupo District Council had administrative staff trained to a high level. They respond to any enquiries about the progress of applications, enter relevant data, and handle routine correspondence. Consent officers at the council commented that they spent more time focused on core planning decisions than at other councils they had worked at.

Manukau City Council has a dedicated customer services team (including four resource management planners) that provide information and advice to the public. The team ‘filters’ a lot of general and specific enquiries on resource consent requirements that consent officers would otherwise be dealing with.

We found that around a fifth of the consent officers (mostly the more junior staff) did not have any formal training or qualifications in resource management or planning, but came from science backgrounds.

Clearly resource consent processing can require a lot of planning expertise but it is possible that councils could make more use of non-consent officers in processing routine resource consent applications so long as appropriate on the job training and supervision are provided.

Level of priority for meeting statutory timeframes

Having a culture in place within the resource consents team and the entire council that strives to meet the statutory timeframes was found to be one of the biggest factors influencing council performance. That is, the degree of importance compliance with statutory timeframes is given appears to influence timeframes.

Taupo District Council decided that meeting the timeframes was a priority for them. They commissioned an independent review into their systems and processes to find out why they were failing. Improvements followed to make meeting timeframes a priority for the resource consents teams and the other divisions of council that have input into resource consent processing.

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