Key draft changes for the future District Plan

The Council’s District Plan Committee has endorsed the following draft changes for further development, which we’re now consulting on:

  • establishing a policy overlay, ie notation on planning maps, which would be applied to existing commercial and industrial businesses within the residential zones. Such an overlay is used to spatially identify an area in the district/settlement which has distinctive values, environmental risks or factors that require management in a different manner from the underlying zone provisions.

By applying a policy overlay approach, existing commercial or industrial activities on residentially zoned land could change without having to apply for a resource consent as long as they met certain standards. For example a vet clinic may be replaced by a doctor’s surgery, so long as the adverse effects on traffic and residential character on the surrounding environment remain comparable. Alternatively the land could be used purely for residential uses.

  • developing new standards for district’s settlements without business zones which would be:
  1. more permissive, for example, by removing the requirement for employees to be resident on site; while on the other hand
  2. still controlling business activities to ensure they don’t adversely affect the residential character of the nearby residential properties. For example through rules such as maximum height of the building and hours of operation.
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