Six months ago, the council’s ability to issue building consents hung in the balance.
An IANZ audit of its building consents department in May identified a raft of problems, including inadequate record-keeping and staff training and issuing code compliance certificates without receiving enough information.
It found an understaffed department struggling in the midst of a building boom to meet statutory maximum times for issuing consents. Building firms and landowners were experiencing delays of weeks and months.
The council was faced with the real prospect of losing its authority to perform one of its most basic functions.
Less than three years earlier, IANZ had stripped the Christchurch City Council of its accreditation, forcing the Government to appoint a Crown manager.
But Queenstown’s council has succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand, scrambling to implementing IANZ’s 10 "corrective action requests" and four "strong recommendations".
Although IANZ’s audit report finds the department’s performance has "improved considerably", it has issued another long list of things to work on, including two new "corrective action requests" that must be fully resolved by the end of January.
The first seeks to ensure amendments to consent applications are not issued with separate code compliance certificates, while the second requires a change to the way specific systems in buildings — such as fire alarms and sprinklers — are described in consent documentation.
It also makes 15 recommendations, six of them "strong", to guide the department as it returns to something resembling best practice.
But it also issues a warning: "Strong recommendations have the potential to become non-conformances and will be followed up at the next assessment."
Staff training and recruitment — or more particularly the lack of it — come in for some of the strongest language.
In April, IANZ assessors found no staff training had been planned, undertaken or monitored. In the latest report, they found ‘‘minimal’’ training had been planned over the last six months.
The department’s approach to recruiting staff and contractors is also under the spotlight. The latest report urges the council to consider other ways to attract and retain staff.
It found the most complex commercial transactions are being handled by contractor Holmes Farsight.
"The [department] could consider increasing commercial fees to better the reflect the cost to the council of sending this work to contractors."
Consent decisions needed to be recorded better, as did the reasons for the decisions, which were found to be inconsistent across the department’s staff and contractors. It found incomplete or poor quality applications were still being accepted.
On the positive side, the report dishes out praise for the way the council has improved its performance to meet national guidelines for issuing consents within the legally prescribed timeframes.
Ninety-five percent of building consents were issued in under 20 working days, compared to four months earlier when it was achieving an average of only 26%.
That "remarkable result" had stemmed from the recruitment of nine staff members over the course of the year and the hiring of more contractors.
IANZ will not assess the department’s performance again until next October — "unless [it] undergoes any critical changes".
