In an “unusual” turn of events, Nelson City Council has an unexpected new deadline to respond to a scathing rebuke of its proposed hazard maps: Christmas Eve.
The council’s plan to enable higher density housing by making it easier to build up — Plan Change 29 — has been scrutinised and criticised by the public since it was notified in August 2023 and the process had been nearing its end.
Submitters to the plan were heard in August and September 2024, and the council’s final replies to submitter opposition were lodged on November 27.
From that point on, the hearing panel was meant to enter deliberations before making a recommendation on the plan to the council sometime in the first quarter of 2025.
However, the legal counsel for a group of developers opposing the council’s proposal has filed a surprise memo reiterating the group’s long-held concerns with the quality of the slope hazard maps contained within the plan.
The slope hazard maps have been a particular and significant point of contention across the city.
A slope hazard map identifies areas which are potentially susceptible to slope instability and may be used in building and resource consent processes.
In his memo from last week, counsel Nigel McFadden was scathing of the council’s evidence.
The group’s own experts were not able to reproduce the council’s version of the maps and had identified errors “so wide ranging that they show the maps have no scientific basis”, McFadden said. His chief concern was the geomorphic mapping which he said falls “entirely short” of what is necessary and said more peer reviews needed to take place.
“Right now for PC29, we have the absurd situation where properties, known to be located on historical landslide debris have been excluded from the overlays, while other properties that show no geomorphic evidence of ever being affected by instability are included.”
By sending his memo, McFadden hoped the panel would have “the correct information” supplied to them by the council.
The independent chair of the hearing panel, commissioner Greg Hill, issued a direction on Monday acknowledging that receiving a memo from submitters after the council had lodged its final reply was “unusual”.
“However, given the nature of the contents of the memorandum, the hearing panel has decided to accept it as part of the PC29 hearing process,” he said.
To uphold procedural fairness and natural justice, the council will have until December 24 to respond to the concern outlined by McFadden on behalf of the group of developers, prolonging the plan change process by a month.
Since their release, developers and property owners have said the proposed new maps have made it harder to insure properties and have had a “chilling effect” on the housing market.
The group of developers have also long claimed that the underlying data used to create the maps was fundamentally flawed and needed to be restarted from scratch.
That view was partly reinforced by an error being discovered in the mapping which, after correction, saw almost 1100 properties removed from areas susceptible to slope risk.
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