The Wellington City Council wants the Government to grant local authorities more prerogatives to curb heritage listings in its planning law reforms.
By Justin Wong of Local Democracy Reporting
The proposed replacements for the Resource Management Act (RMA) – the Natural Environment and Planning bills – would force local government to pay "regulatory relief" to private property owners for imposing planning restrictions such as heritage listings and Significant Natural Areas designations.
The council’s submission to both bills asked for powers to strip buildings’ heritage listings to avoid paying compensation, to give private landowners the right to say no to their house being listed, and make granting heritage listings to be by consent only.
It further wanted provisions stating local government could consider "economic, cultural, urban and other outcomes" in determining if a heritage listing was appropriate.
Not every councillor backed the paragraphs that deputy mayor Ben McNulty introduced to the submission during a Planning and Finance Committee meeting on Thursday: Diane Calvert, Ray Chung, Tony Randle, Karl Tiefenbacher and Nicola Young opposed the sections on warranting councils to override heritage listings.
Calvert, Chung, Tiefenbacher and Young voted against including the paragraph about changing heritage listings to by consent only.
For years, the council and other property owners in the capital struggled to bulldoze buildings where their heritage listings proved stubborn to remove, the most high-profile contemporary example being Victoria University of Wellington’s Gordon Wilson Flats.
"[The] council imposing a heritage listing on a property could mean that we may need to pay that property owner regulatory relief," McNulty said. "If the Government is of the mind to do that, [the] council must have a mechanism to be able to delist the properties for our balance sheet."
Singapore or Shanghai?
Chung thought McNulty’s amendment went "too far", saying there needed to be a balance between preserving heritage and building houses.
He used Singapore as an example of new houses being built with kept-up colonial era buildings, whereas Shanghai "lost its character" when the old city got bowled over for skyscrapers.
"I feel that we should err on the side of caution and don’t rush into these things."
The rest of the Wellington council’s submission on new planning laws said the proposed regulatory relief would pile on extra costs for councils and it was "unreasonable" for the Government and courts to require a council to protect something and then force it to compensate the landowner for it.
It also said both bills did not address the role that land use and environmental planning plays in climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Councillors also approved the council’s submission on the Government’s shakeups to local government structure and replacing regional councillors with a Combined Territorial Board of local mayors, who would be responsible for writing a "Regional Reorganisation Plan".
While it recognised a "compelling case" to simplify local government, the Wellington council had questions on how its Combined Territorial Board work would sit with mayors’ existing duties.
"Our strong preference is to work directly with neighbouring councils to investigate future governance options for the Wellington region, including amalgamation, rather than establishing a Combined Territorial Board as the first step."
– Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air
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