We need planning regulations we can rely on

The letters from Brian Lewis, Bryan Ellis, June Mitchell and Laurie Powell in your most recent issue (edition 457) say everything that can be said about Central Coast Council's bungling of development control on the Woy Woy Peninsula.

The present system is a farce, and the Council clearly has no idea of how to remedy it.

This issue alone contained four reports on non-conforming developments that had been approved by Council, and this practice is a common occurrence.

This means that either: The development regulations have no relationship to reality or; the development regulations are being administered incompetently or corruptly for the benefit of particular developers.

I do not believe for a minute that the Council staff members are anything but as diligent as they can be in administering the regulations, so it is obvious that the regulations themselves are worthless.

If a multiplicity of non-conforming developments can be deemed appropriate, the standards must be wrong and should be changed accordingly, but the Council seems incapable of grasping this.

As it stands, nobody knows whether a Development Application will be judged in accordance with the regulations or by some idiosyncratic standard that ignores the regulations as incorrect.

This is no way to run a railroad.

We need regulations we can rely on, or the system is reduced to chaos.

Of course, as I have said many times, the present controls are based on no credible research, observe no system of logic, are internally inconsistent, are practically opaque in their method of presentation and don't achieve the results we want, as is obvious from a cursory glance at the poor quality of development in the city, so departing from them is an obvious temptation.

If we want the Peninsula to be a liveable community and we want to welcome a diverse range of households into it, we need some imaginative thinking about our goals and the mechanisms to achieve them.

However, as long as the donkey vote elects the same old suspects onto the Council, we are unlikely to see much change.

This is not to say that I am in complete agreement with all the views expressed.

We cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend that the Peninsula can be preserved exactly as it is, just because that happens to be the way we liked it when we moved here.

The next generation will be the ones living in the community we create, and we have to respect their wishes about it, perhaps even over our own.

They are the ones who need to be consulted first.

Many people prefer taller buildings, and they are just as entitled to live in Woy Woy as anyone is.

As long as amenity is preserved, a building can be any height and still fit the urban-scape.

It is this kind of draconian regulation that creates the situation where breaches of regulation become the norm, until the regulations become little more than a suggestion for developers to find some way around.

I am against social housing per se, but disadvantaged people exist in our community and have to be catered for.

In catering for them, they are best located in such centres as Woy Woy, Gosford, Tuggerah and Wyong which are public-transportation nodes and have the easiest access to the kind of support services these individuals and households rely on.

If this means boarding houses in Woy Woy, I say let us have them but let them be properly designed and integrated boarding houses.

Email, 7 Nov 2018

Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy