I hate the council process!

As a Council planning officer I can empathise with the long delay. There can be many reasons for the delay. Is the design fully compliant with Council’s Planning rules. My advice to developers and designers is make it comply and we’ll approve. (Usually within 3-4 weeks)
The land may be close to a creek or river or classified road thus requiring approval from other authories. Can’t blame the Council for that.

The first question to the assessment officer is “what is the hold up and what can I do to assist?”
Perhaps you should have used a planning consultant as well as the architect. Consultants generally know the planning officers better than architects. They re usually able to talk ‘planning speak’ to the assessing officers and work out an acceptable outcome.

All being said, I believe 10 months is absolutely rediculous and worthy of contating all your Councillors, but make sure you have all your facts, not feelings, straight and clear.
Some developers call the Manager of Planning directly, and keep calling until they achieve a meeting to discuss the problem.

Other problems may involve lack of resources to the planning dept due to the increasing complexity of legislation caused by the general public wanting more and more rules along with pressure from senior management to keep on lower costs and making Council staff numbers leaner, particularly in the non-vote winning areas such as planning, building and engineering.

Good luck and seek an immediate meeting to discuss any issues with the object of keeping to discuss the problems until they are solved. Start the meeting by asking to hear Council’s concenrs, then repeat those concenrs back to the Council officers so that they feel you understand their concerns. You may find some common ground that you had not considered before.

Hi Giulio

Nordicskier and Alistair are both right in what they are saying with processes and so forth. I’m not sure what State you are in but in QLD there are quite a few concurrent agencies that you have to deal with depending on where your land is situated, such as NRM, EPA, Main Roads, GBRMPA etc. Each of these agencies has a certain time frame to respond to your request as well and an extension period which most of them use. 10 months though is quite a long time not to know anything especially on something as straight forward as adding a unit(depending on if your current zoning allows it) As Nordicskier said try to organise a meeting with one of the Council Officers(Planners)and find out exactly where your application is at. If you haven’t even gone to the Public notification stage yet then you are still in for quite a few months until a final decision. Once you advertise Public notification depending if any concurrent agencies are involved you will need to have your signs up from 15 business to 28 business. Then the Council has another 20 days to peruse all the objections and if needed extend for another 20 days and then get back to you usually with another information request asking you to answer the objections if any. The application will then go back to the Council Officers who will either reccommend it for approval or refusal. They however don’t have the final say, and then depending on how back logged they are with other applications you may have to wait for another couple of months before having a chance to be voted on in Council. (It is never a good idea to put Council off side until after this stage) Then you will get your decision, hopefully it is for approval, if not then you have a chance to appeal through the Land and Environment Court, which unless your project is worth quite a bit to you, you might be better off to forget about it as it can cost quite a few dollars to fight with specialised Lawyers.

Also to quote Alistair “don’t expect professional advice from an architect when it comes to town planning (some are very knowledgable in this area but most aren’t), get a town planning consultant.”

Hopefully this will be of some assistance to you.