City Councillors, or to be fair the usual suspects on Council, rolled over on Tuesday handing over the last vestige of any input in planning control* to an unelected Administration, voting to remove from the Delegated Authority Register exemptions that prohibited officers from making determinations on `non conforming` development applications where objections from the public had been received.
Councillors now require that you the ratepayer have to force them to do what many of you might in your confusion have assumed was their responsibility.
Delegated Authority in a nutshell means that whilst only the elected Council has the power to approve or refuse building applications and permits under the Planning and Development Act, they can under the Local Government Act delegate that authority, or specific parts of it to the (unelected) Administration. This is common practice amongst LGA’s and quite sensible especially in Stirling which sees 10’s of thousands of applications every year, the idea being that you delegate away anything that does not require significant discretion or when a development is conforming or perhaps only slightly non conforming (fence is 10cm too high etc) , this covers the vast majority of applications.
When the variations from that which are allowed under the R-Codes or the Local and State Planning Policies are significant (more storeys than allowed ,excessive bulk etc) there is an expectation that the discretion required to determine such applications should be made by the Elected Council who are responsible for their decisions every 4 years at election time, or at least that’s how it used to be, until Tuesday night when Council voted to delegate away the kitchen sink.
There still exists a `call in` process a knight in shining armour polished by Councillor Caddy and Mayor Sandri … ok there is some confusion about how it works and how lucky we are to have one given some other Councils (that do not need such a process) do not have one… and of course you have to ignore the fact that the call in process is policed by the unelected Administration , I digress;
Councillor Caddy noted that removing these exemptions…
“makes it far less confusing for the community but it doesn’t actually strip away any of Councils power to bring items to council for determination.”
Does not strip away any power ? fact check: unknown, the call in process is to be reviewed and codified -by the Planning Directorate- sometime before the end of the year , Councillor Caddy can not know how the call in process is going to work when reviewed and even Town Planner Mayor Sandri was only recently made aware of the time limits to the current call in process.
Placing Council’s alleged power in a call in process that is going to change in an unknown manner, to be determined as far as we are aware not by a resolution of Council but by the Administration seems …to call it problematic would be too simple.
Nor is this `less confusing` for the community, the community by and large knows nothing about the call in process in the first place unless they have read the `must read` delegated authority register and then manage to dig up the policy surrounding the call in process, which if such exists, is not publicly available, & even then have to get a Ward Councillor onside**, or the Mayor, or if the Mayor is not available the Deputy Mayor, though if the application is from the Deputy Mayors Town Planning Company they would then presumably have to ask the deputy deputy Mayor … whoever that might be. Then that Councillor would need to have enough planning knowledge to convince the Administration that the application deserved to be brought before Council and get another Councillor onside, !simples!.
Councillor Caddy is fully aware of the issues surrounding call ins given she has failed previously to have at least one application `called in` in the past because the Administration advised that there was no valid planning reason for the requested call-in despite there existing objective evidence to the contrary, but under the current system it is the the Administration who is – on pain of sanction – the only authoritative source, other Councillors have previously been denied call in’s due to time constraints allegedly contained in this mysterious and opaque process.
There is no ‘protection’ guaranteed by the call in process.
There is no ‘protection’ guaranteed by the call in process, none, if a Councillor disagrees with an officer deciding not to call in an application… well, put simply – they can’t – they are not allowed to, and should they do so it would be an offence under the Local Government Act.
What Councillor Caddy’s `confused` community, to my knowledge expect, is what has always happened before under the admittedly badly worded policy – that if a development application required advertising (automatically branding it in some way non conforming with something) and the community provided objections, that there was a high probability that the application would come before Council for determination automatically.
Of course some of the `confused` community actually think that is part of Councils job, but you get those types in every Council~
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8 Councillors, the required `absolute majority` including Mayor Sandri and Deputy CEO Irwin along with the other usual suspects voted to delegate away their authority and their accountability.
[Stirling Times 25/06/2020]
Councillors Re, Farrelly and Spagnolo spoke against this motion and were joined in voting against it by Clrs Thornton, Hatton, Lagan & Perkov.
Not for the first time, I must emphasise that delegation of authority is NOT delegation of responsibility, this vote culminated in an abdication of duty by the same Councillors that rubber stamp every similar attempt to remove power and responsibility from the Elected Council to the unelected Administration.
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You should read on only if you are remotely interested in the legal issues with the wording of the delegations register.
There were indeed problems with the removed exemptions, they were badly written, and rewritten over the years , they were that badly written that any planning refusal caught under the exemptions and then refused under delegated authority in the last 4?+ years has been made without authority, made ultra vires.
Governance has previously been made aware of these issues but were confident, in writing, that this is the way `it has always been done` (a bit like leeches throughout the dark and middle ages)
So yes the exemption required rewording, and at a previous Council meeting changes included the simple but effective amendment of changing the word ‘determination‘ to ‘approval‘ to avoid having to bring all refusals to Council (as theoretically should have , but did not happen before).
The item at that meeting was deferred and by the time we got to Tuesday the offending exemptions were simply removed altogether along with the already anaemic protection they offered the Community.
Even with the wording change the exemption would still have been deeply flawed in that the point of the exemption was to remove delegated authority from the Administration – if amenity related concerns had been assessed to exist and objections were received – as it was the planning department were using the exemption that exempted them from making determinations if the issue they were determining was exempt from determination , I know that does not make any sense but that’s kind of the point, but as the Manager of Governance previously pointed out, that’s the way they have always done it.
Advice from the Planning Directorate at the meeting prompted by the Deputy CEO and CEO suggested that without removing these clauses that all refusals would have to come before Council, true unless the original rewording was accepted which would have fixed that pronto, this was a misdirection from the same department that will decide how call ins are managed.
To be fair to the Director of Planning seems to be of the inclination to do things properly… unlike the previous Director and require that the delegation exemptions were processed as written (to the point that this is possible), then thousands of applications could potentially have come before Council, but removal of the exceptions altogether is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(Bad and non existent delegation were the beginnings of the Town of Cambridge’s Woes)
If however the spirit of the exception had been retained but properly worded we would be back to a status quo where the existing exemptions that had only caught 7 applications in the previous 12 months are all that would have required Councils input, 7, a yearly workload that the Council clearly could not bear, and after all, its only your amenity at stake, not theirs.
* Applications with Parking shortfalls of greater than 10 still theoretically automatically come to council, but given these are usually DAP approvals they will still bypass Council in most circumstances.
** There are Wards, mentioning no names, but there are Wards where certain groups have zero trust or time for their Ward Councillors to the point that they usually ask a Councillor from outside their Ward to represent them in Council on various matters, something that seriously upsets Governance.
