December already! It’s been another busy year as the Waikato district continues to grow. This year we've received 1688 building consent applications (January to the end of November). We continue to be one of the fastest growing districts in the country, and it’s not hard to see why. Waikato offers a fantastic lifestyle with wonderful communities, a beautiful rural landscape and it’s a great place to invest. This growth continues to keep you – and us – busy.
As well as the growth, there have been a number of legislative changes this year which have kept us all on our toes. Key changes have been the swimming pool safety legislation and changes to the Resource Management Act.
We also made changes so that we can accept building consent applications electronically. The great news is that we’re now receiving 49% by email but we’d love to see more of you getting rid of your paper applications. This is the first step towards streamlining the process and making things much more customer-friendly, so watch this space!
Office hours over Christmas and January
We’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that our offices are open until 2pm on Friday 22 December and reopen on Wednesday 3 January. Our staff will be taking a well-deserved break over the Christmas period and we are looking forward to coming back in the new year and supporting you. Please note that until 15 January we only have a skeleton crew of inspectors and consent processing staff on board so please bear with us.
A heads-up also that statutory close-down period is from 20 December to 10 January (inclusive) for building and resource consents, and from 25 December to 2 January (inclusive) for LIMs and DC reconsiderations. The statutory close-down period means that application processing clocks will stop. We’ll continue to accept lodgement of applications over this time but the clocks won’t run.
On behalf of our consents teams, I wish you all a happy, safe Christmas and all the best for 2018.
We look forward to working with you again in the new year.
Sue O’Gorman
Customer Support General Manager
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