Planning processing continues to deteriorate
Central Coast Council services continue to deteriorate for Peninsula residents despite massive rate hikes.
A report to this week's Council meeting shows that only 11.3 per cent of residential development applications were processed within 40 days.
This is a further decline on last quarter's poor result in which only 16 per cent were processed within 40 calendar days.
The mean processing time for development applications is now 119 days which is 40 per cent more than July last year when Administrator Mr Rik Hart announced he had hired 19 more people and told the July Council meeting: "I'm certainly hopeful we will see a big improvement and, if we don't, I will have to ask the reason why."
The latest mean determination time of 119 days represents a deterioration of 40 per cent since Mr Hart promised this "big improvement."
Rather than throwing ever more ratepayers' money at the problem, perhaps they should look at management performance and productivity.
It was a mistake to abolish the quarterly development application performance report as that could have provided insights into the root causes of the continuing deterioration.
Improving bad results is more important than trying to hide them.
Mr Hart's bungled 2020 restructure, in which staff cuts were allocated evenly across departments rather than on a prioritised basis, has contributed to the problem.
Experienced staff in the planning department were paid out with expensive redundancies, only to be replaced later by less experienced staff to do the same work.
This has been an expensive blunder that could only have had a detrimental effect on productivity.
Until management performance and productivity improve, ratepayers will continue to pay more for worse services.
SOURCE:
Email, 20 May 2023
Kevin Brooks, Bensville