Comprehensive Coastal Consenting

Overview:
When the Auckland Regional Coastal Plan became operative, all existing unconsented coastal structures needed to be assessed against the new statutory requirements and if necessary, consented.

Auckland City Council came to us to address this problem; firstly looking at assets owned by the Parks and Open Space department, closely followed by the Transport departments. The success of the consenting strategy adopted for Auckland City Council was recognised by Tauranga City Council, and ASL were consequently engaged to undertake a similar exercise for their wastewater assets.  

Innovative Approach:

We developed a consent acquisition strategy to address the legal requirements, which balanced the existing nature of the various assets with the information required by the Regional Council.

Firstly, the applications had to be lodged prior to a certain date to meet the statutory requirements. Due to the level of information available, complete applications were not able to be lodged. So with the agreement of the Regional Council, a proforma application was lodged to meet the legal deadline and thereby enabling the continued use of the assets while the new consents were acquired.

Rather than consent each individual asset separately, we negotiated a solution with the Auckland Regional Council where a single comprehensive application would be prepared seeking consents for contiguous groups of assets. We also negotiated an approach that resulted in minimal information requirements and a generic assessment of environmental effects. This approached resulted in significant savings in time and project costs, both in the project delivery phase and in the long term during the life cycle of the consent.

We then worked with the councils to obtain all the necessary asset information, and completed the application in parallel to this process. Following a relatively simple review process, conditions were negotiated with the Auckland Regional Council that did not place any undue or unreasonable requirements on Auckland City Council.

Following this, the process was seamlessly replicated for Auckland City’s transport assets (i.e. retaining walls, jetties, boat ramps etc).

We used the same process for Tauranga’s wastewater assets, with the only key difference in that we successfully negotiated a single comprehensive consent covering all assets.

Success:

The approach resulted in the timely and extremely cost effective delivery of:

• 50 Coastal Permits for approximately 275 individual Auckland City Council parks assets
• 45 Coastal Permits for approximately 300 individual Auckland City Council transport assets
• 1 Coastal Permit for approximately 200 individual Tauranga City Council wastewater assets

It also demonstrates our ability to think outside of the traditional planning way of thinking and our ongoing commitment to deliver innovative cost effective solutions for our clients.

Client:
Auckland City Council
Tauranga City Council