While it’s not necessarily directly related to Auckland’s transport, as my day job is being a planner I do live and breathe the Resource Management Act on a daily basis, so therefore the reforms proposed by National last week are definitely worthy of some sort of comment. There may also be ways in which the reforms eventually do affect the development of Auckland’s transportation.

I guess for a start they could definitely be worse. Original proposals had the definition of “environment” stripped down to simply natural and physical resources, which would have completely gutted the RMA and the whole idea of planning. Thankfully that wasn’t included, so things like amenity effects and effects on Maori values remain important aspects of the enviornment. Furthermore, a reasonable number of the proposals are justifiable: like searching for ways to reduce trade competitors from using the RMA to wage their trade wars, increasing the fines for non-compliance with resource consents and also a few of the proposals that will hopefully speed up the processing of consents and council plan changes.

However, at the same time there are also a number of worries that emerge from these procedural changes. Submitters appear to be more limited in what they can appeal to the environment court, applicants appear able to choose the commissioners they want at their hearings, those appealing to the environment courts may have to stump up thousands and thousands of dollars as security against costs if they lose their case and so forth. These are worrying steps that are being dressed up as “removing the handbrake from development”, but in effect actually involve taking away the rights of those to have a decent say in developments that happen. I don’t deny that the current situation has its problems, but I do think that in general the existing RMA is quite robust and flexible with problems often resulting from poor council rules and regulations, or from the Ministry for the Environment not having the guts to create enough National Policy Statements (until the last couple of years) and not ‘calling in’ enough major projects (once again, until the last couple of years). It is a worry if taking a case to the environment court becomes something that clearly the rich can only afford, and that is a possibility under these changes.

My main issue with the proposed changes relate to a bit that everyone else seems to have ignored. It sits on page six of the proposals and reads:

Inserting provisions into the RMA that remove the ability for blanket tree protection rules to be imposed in urban areas. These rules generate more than 4000 resource consent applications annually.

Now this is a pretty freaky legislation change to make. Actually banning councils from creating a particular rule seems to be a huge trampling of local government by central government, not to mention the enormous risk to trees around the country. There is a reason that local councils impose blanket tree protection rules – generally to trees over 6m in height, although sometimes there’s a lower limit when it comes to native trees. Alternative ways of protecting trees would involve the identification of potentially thousands of trees within a District that were considered worthy of protection. Without blanket protection I would imagine that a huge number of trees would be cut down in urban areas, as already there are not only the large number of consent applicatons but also a significant number of situations where people illegally remove trees. It would be very sad to see a city like Auckland lose a huge number of mature trees, which is very much a possibility if this change goes ahead.

That’s not to say there are problems with the current tree rules. Obviously, one unintended consequence of having a blanket protection is that people are put off planting trees or have them taken out at 5.5m, to ensure they won’t become problematic later on. Furthermore, many councils (like Auckland City) have written stupid rules that only allow applications to be assessed on the basis of a tree’s health, rather than wider environmental concerns. However, this isn’t reason to completely abandon such rules – it feels like using a sledgehammer on a problem that could easily be sorted out through smarter and more flexible council rules.

I suppose that’s the kind of feeling I get about all the changes, where it feels like the RMA is getting blamed for problems that probably only occur in situations where it’s poorly implemented. It seems that the government couldn’t really moan about the RMA forever without at least looking like it was making dramatic changes to it. I guess we’ll see what survives the select committee process, hopefully not the tree rules that’s for sure!

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