Get Informed About Resource Consents

It’s a com­mon com­plaint: “how could the Coun­cil let people build that, and not even noti­fy any­one?” That’s partly down to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of what “noti­fic­a­tion” means under the RMA: it’s not just about let­ting people know, but also the start of a long and com­plex pro­cess involving hear­ings, law­yers and pos­sible appeals, and it only occurs when a pro­pos­al goes some way bey­ond what’s per­mit­ted under the Dis­trict Plan. Most resource con­sents aren’t noti­fied in that sense, but they are pub­lic inform­a­tion, so the­or­et­ic­ally every­one should be able to know about it.

In prac­tice, though, it’s not that easy. Lists of recently received or issued con­sents are pub­lished on the WCC web­site every fort­night, but you have to remem­ber to look, down­load a PDF, and scan through to see if any­thing might affect you.

To make that easi­er, I’ve been doing some work with loc­al com­pany Thun­dermaps to gath­er this inform­a­tion, map it, and let you receive alerts when some­thing pops up. I’ve writ­ten a full descrip­tion on their blog, but all you have to do is:

• sign up (it’s free);
• draw the area that you’re inter­ested in; and
• receive email alerts or smart­phone noti­fic­a­tions whenev­er the Coun­cil pub­lishes inform­a­tion about a new con­sent in that area.

If you don’t want the noti­fic­a­tion ser­vice, you can just go and browse the map to see what’s hap­pen­ing across Wel­ling­ton. At the moment, we’re just gath­er­ing pub­lic inform­a­tion about WCC con­sents, and this is only updated every fort­night, but we hope to get oth­er Coun­cils on board to make it easi­er for every­one to keep in the loop about devel­op­ments in their com­munity. That would make it easi­er for every­one to see, for instance, that…hey, a rooftop bar in Mt Vic!