Wellington City councillors and staff at odds over heritage protections
Whether you’re in local or central government, when you’ve been given a democratic mandate by your community to make decisions on their behalf, it’s reasonable to expect that once you’ve made a decision that the organisation you’re governing will carry it out… right? Well, it turns out Wellington City councillors are now at odds with Wellington City Council staff thanks to a Section 42 report at the current district plan hearings.
As reported by Stuff’s Erin Gourley, in their Section 42 report that’s given to the hearing commissioners staff have recommended that approximately 800 houses be added back into the District Plan’s Protected Zones (which limit development and protect character areas, largely on heritage grounds).
The problem? This topic has already been the subject of intense debate at the Council table, where staff had the opportunity to present their advice, councillors considered it, and narrowly voted to reduce the protected zones.
If you’re not familiar with how the district plan process works, here’s an overly simplistic version of it:
Council either has to come up with a whole new district plan or needs to make changes to the existing plan.
Often they’ll do “pre-consultation” which is basically going out and talking to the community and interested parties (developers, central government etc) to get their initial thoughts.
A proposal is developed and Council debates and approves this to go out for public consultation.
A formal consultation process is held with people making submissions, there’s public hearings, reports and advice is written by council staff, and eventually Council makes a decision on whether to notify the new plan or changes.
They then appoint independent commissioners to a hearings panel, which in turn receives submissions, people can cross submit, they get various more reports, have public hearings, and eventually they go away, deliberate, and make a recommendation to Council.
Council then holds another debate and vote on whether to accept or reject the findings of the commissioners.
This is a very quick and dirty outline of the process, and there’s a lot of more in-depth material out there about it, but you get the gist.
So what’s happened here is council staff provided advice to councillors, councillors decided to reduce the protected zone, and it got publicly notified. Now, when its come to the hearings, council staff have recommended to commissioners to reinstate protections to nearly 800 properties.
The bone of contention is to whether council staff have gone beyond their remit in offering recommendations when providing their expert advice on the impacts of the proposed changes.
As is detailed in Gourley’s story, staff believe they’re bound to provide recommendations as part of their Section 42 report. Some councillors see things very differently, not least because the recommendations staff have provided go against the decision that council made to reduce the protected areas.
Having been a councillor and gone through this process in the 2019-2022 triennium, I can understand where councillors are coming from. They feel staff could provide free and frank advice on the impacts of the reduced protected zone without venturing into offering recommendations on changes to the proposed plan changes that councillors feel effectively relitigates the decision they’d already made.
Staff would in turn likely argue that the Section 42 report was part of the advice provided to Council (I’m not 100 percent sure on whether it was, I certainly know in our case in Kāpiti for our Plan Change 2 it had the required reports ready when we approved it for notification) and as such has carried forward into the hearings.
Ultimately, what this could set up is a messy legal situation if the independent commissioners opt to reinstate some of the lost protected zones, and then Council decides to go against the commissioners when the matter comes back to them
