Many readers tell us they miss Council’s Development Applications being advertised in the paper, as they don’t feel they know what is going on.

In response to this, Roger Lyle and Perrie Croshaw have put together a guide to navigate the online planning maze. All require online access, but there are some shortcuts that will help.

Increasingly, residents want to be alerted to and track the progress of local DAs, including ones which are not necessarily close to where they live.

Council does notify immediate neighbours of a development, but if you don’t live next door, you may never know what is planned for your street until it is built.

Regulations were changed in 2021 so that the public are officially notified about developments through the NSW Planning Portal, where all DAs now have to be lodged electronically, or the Kiama Council website.

Neither website has an alert function for interested citizens, so the onus is on the public to be vigilant.

Finding out about new DAs

The easiest way to stay on top of things is to sign up for PlanningAlerts, a reliable, free service.

The site, which searches planning authority websites, is run by the charity OpenAustraliaFoundation.

The foundation says that its aim is to “enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in people’s communities.”

An example of a PlanningAlert

Enter an address and your email and you will receive alerts of any DAs within a 2km radius of the address you entered. You can create multiple alerts simply by

specifying different addresses, and click through to the main repository of information, Council’s DA Tracker.

The DA Tracker on Council’s website allows you to view DA details, activity applications and complying DAs which have been lodged with or received by Council since January 1, 2015.

However it only includes detailed information on DAs currently on exhibition.

You will need to agree to Terms and Conditions, then you are taken to a page which contains a map with red icons showing applications which have been lodged over the previous two weeks.

On the left of the page, you can search for a specific DA using the street address, lot number, application year or application number.

You can download the submitted DA documentation as a series of PDFs.

If you are at all interested in tracking this development over time, you may want to save those documents in a folder on your device as Council takes down this

information after the Public Exhibition stage of the DA assessment process.

The NSW Planning Portal is useful if you want to look up zoning maps, Development Control Plans (DCPs) and Local Environmental Plans (LEPs) for any address in NSW.

What to look for in a DA

Once you have found a DA you’d like to know more about, usually the most important documents are:

• Site map: see where the development is located
• The Statement of Environmental Effects: this is the report by the DA applicant that details and explains the likely impacts of the proposed development both during and after the development, and the proposed measures that will mitigate these impacts. The report also sets out the proposed development’s compliance with the range of development controls that pertain to the site and importantly highlights any variation to these controls that the applicant is seeking.
• Look at the plans: floor plans, elevations, shadow plans and others to get an idea of what the structure will finally look like and the impact it may have on neighbouring properties.

How to make a comment/submission for or against a DA

All comments/submissions must be emailed or posted to Council within the public exhibition period – usually 14 days – which is indicated on the Kiama Council DA Tracker.

Council is required to take these comments into account when assessing the DA. All submissions to Council can be made public.

If there are more than five comments against the proposal or the development has a value of greater than $6 million, it will have to go to full Council Meeting for

approval or rejection, and cannot be decided by staff delegation.

Councillors can also request that a development be brought in front of the Council for decision.

Other DAs are approved or rejected under staff delegation.

For those DAs that do go before Council, the public (or their representative) have a final chance to make a submission at Public Access, which is held at the Council Chambers at 5pm on the Monday before the Council meeting.

The public are given a five minute period to address the Councillors and make a submission either for or against the proposed development.

However, only one person from the public can speak on either side of the argument at the meeting.

Once the assessment process is finished an Assessment Report is written and the Notice of Determination, which sets out the terms and condition of the approval or why it wasn’t approved, is prepared. You can request this document from Council, as it doesn’t include this final Assessment Report and Notice of Determination on the DA Tracker.

In our opinion, Kiama Council should consider a more transparent DA tracking system, for example such as that used by Mosman Council. It publishes each document relevant to any DA, including the final Assessment Report and the Notice of Determination, and leaves all documents pertaining to each DA on its DA tracking system for future public reference.

Use your Precinct

If you are at all concerned about a DA, bring it to the attention of your local Precinct group. If it concerns you, it will probably also concern others in the community.

Its members may also have more expertise in planning matters that you could benefit from.

A word about complying developments

It is possible to obtain combined planning and construction approval for straight forward developments as a complying development.

These developments are determined through a fast track assessment against pre-determined development standards by either Council or an accredited certifier.

Complying developments are listed on DA Tracker after they are approved, so there is no opportunity for public comment. However, neighbours will be advised before the development activity commences.