In a report to this week's planning and strategy committee meeting, council planning practice manager Blair Devlin said the council reviewed its fees and charges last year as part of a special consultative procedure and the revised charges became part of the 2016-17 annual plan.
Since then, officers had identified a small number of changes which were required to help with the ``consistent and smooth administration of regulatory functions''.
Changes to the way monitoring charges were collected had also been reviewed.
``At present, once a consent is granted, the applicant is immediately invoiced for the monitoring `initial fee'.''
The $215 ``fixed fee'' - halfway between the two existing monitoring charges from the fee schedule - would be collected up front as part of the consent application, rather than the present approach of invoicing once the consent was issued.
``The change will result in administrative efficiencies in that an invoice will not have to be sent after every consent is issued.''
``If the $215 is collected for each of the approximately 900 land use consents that require monitoring each year, this will fund 60% of the cost of delivering the current monitoring service (approximately $323,000 per annum). The balance of 20% ... is to be recovered from user pays [and] will be collected through compliance monitoring.''
Among the other changes proposed was the addition of a Private Plan Changes category, which was missing from the fees schedule.
``The initial fee is $10,000, reflecting the substantial amount of work involved in processing a private plan change. All time spent processing private plan changes is chargeable to the applicant.''
Several changes are also proposed under the Building Consent and Other Charges Fee Schedule, including raising the charge for checking the installation of a wood burner from $295 to $335 to recover ``actual costs'' associated with the service.
It was also proposed to abolish street frontage bonds in their current form. The purpose of the bond is to cover the cost of any damage to the street frontage, including roads, kerbing and channelling, footpath and grass berm, as a result of development activity.
``Deloitte, our auditors, have raised their concerns regarding the growing multimillion-dollar balance in street frontage bonds in their annual letter to the Audit and Risk Committee for a number of years.''
The existing policy should be replaced by a policy allowing the QLDC to recover repair costs associated with damage to street frontage as a result of property development activities, he suggested.
The committee meeting will be held on Thursday, starting at 10am.
