Consenting backlog costs ECan an extra $5.4m in past year

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

ECan processed just 26% of resource consent applications within the legal time frame in the last year.

Delays, discounts and consultants brought in to help handle a backlog of consent applications cost Canterbury’s ratepayers more than $5 million last year - and even then, only a quarter were done on time.

Environment Canterbury (ECan) processed 26% of resource consent applications within the statutory time frame in 2023-24, well below its target of 95%, according to a year-end report.

This is down on 2022-23, when 35% of resource consent decisions were processed within the required time frame.

Although resource consents are intended to be user pays, the council had to take funding from other areas twice in the past financial year to meet the costs of consent delays and processing.

ECan oversees the largest land area of any regional council, and by far the most irrigation consents - it’s estimated about 70% of the country’s irrigated land is in Canterbury. (File photo)

Under the Resource Management Act (RMA), councils have 20 working days to process non-notified resource consent applications, and must discount fees at a rate of 1% for each working day beyond that, up to a maximum of 50 working days.

The financial impact of ECan’s delays was higher than anticipated.

In May 2023 the council adopted a plan to improve the consenting process, which the year-end report notes required “considerable investment”, including 39 additional staff.

ECan hired 39 additional consent staff over the last financial year in the hope of increasing processing times, tackling legacy consents and an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. (File photo)

In February last year, ECan said consent delays had cost ratepayers $2m in unrecoverable costs.

When councillors voted unanimously later that year to inject $3.5m from general rates reserves to address “immediate performance risks”, operations director Stephen Hall said the money would clear the consenting backlog “in a year’s time”.

But the report notes the budget deficit was “higher than this”, and inquiries have revealed another $1.9m was required.

A wave of consent expiries is looming as ECan struggles to process consents within the legal time frame of 20 working days.

ECan’s acting chief financial officer, Tanya Meikle, said the extra $1.9m was caused by increased spending on external contractors and the loss of fees through discounts for late processing.

In addition to the current workload, an estimated 10,500 of Canterbury's 26,000 active resource consents will expire over the next decade. Significant numbers were due to expire in the five years from year 2025, and ECan anticipated applications would begin to be lodged from this month.

Consents manager Aurora Grant said $2.9m was spent on subcontractors to help process consents in 2023-24.

Ministry for the Environment National Monitoring System data on ECan’s non-notified consent processing within the statutory timeframe 2014 - 2023.

ECan has consistently pointed to ‘legacy consents’ (lodged before August 2023) as exacerbating processing delays. The report states the complexity of handling legacy consents “impacted strongly” on revenue, but work had “progressed well” with over half now resolved.

However, ECan was processing a similar number of consents within the legal time frame in 2007-08 (29%), prompting the 2010 review that culminated in the replacement of the elected council with commissioners.

The review found “much” of the issue with processing delays resulted from a “significant backlog” caused by a surge of consents for the irrigation boom, urban and rural residential development, and the “gold rush effect” of a new regional plan mandating sustainable limits for water takes that was introduced in 2004.

But this week’s update, which will be considered by the council on Wednesday, points to another reason for delays and cost overruns - the worsening state of the rivers, lakes, groundwater and other environments.

Lincoln University associate professor Hamish Rennie said this would be a significant issue, because almost all of ECan’s catchments - many of which have very high ecological and other values - were “degraded well beyond where they were 20 years ago”.

Rennie said while he often criticised ECan, he had empathy for the position it found itself in, given Canterbury’s dairy boom and the role of central government.

He said ECan appeared to be on track with bolstering its staffing, and welcomed changes to its systems to speed up consenting.

But he said it was faced with altering its Land and Water Regional Plan if it wants to issue new consents in over-allocated catchments, which would take time and resources, and would be further complicated by “ever-changing central government requirements”.

The demand for water for rapidly growing urban areas, and the subsequent discharge of contaminants, would further exacerbate pressure on water, he said.

Finally, the competitive market for consent skills - and ECan’s past reluctance to spend money to ensure qualified planners retained their professional standing - was destined to create workforce issues, as would the struggle universities faced in getting undergraduate students interested in planning and consenting issues, Rennie said.

The new 10-year long-term plan, adopted in May, contains targets to meet the statutory time frame for half of consents by 2024-25, increasing to 95% in 2025-26.