I whole heartedly agree with the comments in this article. It’s not shortages of funding or building labour that’s holding us back, its the ever increasing mountains of red tape unnecessary holds up.
I have a meeting with Hamilton City Council tomorrow about a development we have in for resource consent at the moment. We have built almost identical developments to this one several times in Hamilton, in the same suburb, but this time council are moving the goal posts.
We have purchased the development land based on the expectation that council would treat the development the same way as they have done in the past. The district plan has not changed, staff at council have not changed, we haven’t changed, but the resource consent is on hold as we try and escalate to someone in council who will see that there is no need for the hold-up, someone who has some common sense and is willing to actually make a decision. In the meantime we are paying interest on the land, we need to try and move the building crew we had booked in to build this project to another job etc etc…. It’s frustrating, costly and totally unnecessary, yet it happens every day around the country.
