Why can't we ever finish anything? A council planner at their wits' end

The Spinoff

6 days ago

An anonymous council planner asks an anonymous council planner to explain what the government's halt on all planning work will mean for them.
Last week, the government announced that councils must stop plan changes until the new Resource Management Act replacement legislation comes into force. Here, an anonymous council planner explains – through an exasperated interview with themselves – why it's such a 'massive sucker punch'.
What do you do?
I'm a planner working in resource management policy, into my second decade of working in local government. My main piece of work most recently has been a plan change relating to part of my local environment that is incredibly special to me, my community, and our country.
Why do you do it?
Great question, and one I often ask myself given the hatred and blame often thrown at planners for Ruining Everything All The Time™. Contrary to popular belief, I don't sit in an ivory tower sipping a ratepayer-funded latte in isolation thinking up what arsehole rules and red tape I can inflict upon the peasants. I am passionate about my community, and driven to use my professional training and expertise to help protect our environment and all the taonga within. This includes people and their health! And I work in a team of like-minded people who are all in it for the same reasons.
What does this news mean for you? Do you still have a job?
My team was on the cusp of putting a plan change out for public consultation. We've been working on it for years, a draft was already released to the community for feedback, and most recently, given we've been so close to this significant milestone, we've been working long hours, over weekends, and putting our lives a bit on hold to get it done. So this news is a massive sucker punch, it's devastating, and I am still in shock. But the silly thing about it all is that I absolutely still have a job, still have shitloads of work, and will be continuing what I've been doing, it just won't be released as soon as we'd hoped. So I don't really know what the government thinks it is achieving apart from some dilly-dally delay?
But surely you knew this was coming?
No. We truly thought this particular piece of mahi was safe, and we had no warning. The embargoed media release was sent to our managers 30 minutes before it was released publicly. I got back from lunch to a message from my manager asking me to call them ASAP, and got the shock of my life when I was told the news. I'd literally worked until 9pm the previous evening on a presentation we were giving to a group that week to explain how we'd taken on board their feedback on our draft plan and show them the final form it was in. Womp womp.
Doesn't it make sense to stop, though, if we are getting a new resource management system?
This is one of those very classic cases where yeah, it does sound kind of logical on the surface, right? But in practice, it's nonsensical in most cases. It ignores the fact that these plan changes have been considered in annual plans and long-term plans, have been agreed to by councillors, and have often been years and years in the making. Plans are hardly ever reviewed within the 10 years timeframe, and so most are long overdue for an update. The way we manage the environment is also not going to fundamentally change, no matter how the RMA is repackaged – because let's be real, that's all the RM reform is going to do, repackage what we've got with some different wording and some slightly different processes to end up in roughly the same place but with more houses and mines. It is insulting (and ignorant) that the government doesn't understand and respect that we have considered this, and have tailored our work accordingly to ensure that it can transition into a new system (whenever that actually arrives… and sticks).
In fact, a large part of why our plan change has taken longer than we'd hoped is we have had to go back to our council multiple times to check in and get approval to continue again and again, and change our scope so that we could ensure we were still taking the best way forward given the changes and uncertainty in the political environment.
So frustratingly, dealing with the RM reform, rather than being able to progress actual resource management, continues to be prioritised by central government. As stated in the Beehive press release, 'The government's intention is that stopping plan requirements for councils will enable them to focus on critical work to prepare to transition to the new system'. So, I should stop doing my actual job under the actual system that currently exists, so I can prepare for a new system that doesn't even exist yet and isn't proposed to be in place until 2027? (Astute readers will of course realise that this is after the next election, when there is a decent chance of a change in government and it will be repealed anyway).
What critical work do they mean for someone at my level? Attending yet another webinar on what the new acts might hypothetically contain when they are finally released? We've already been down this road with the Natural and Built Environment Act (NBEA), and to be blunt I'm not interested in spending my time (and ratepayers' money!) on learning a new system that (1) I can't actually learn yet, and (2) has no guarantee of ever being in force. Fool me once, shame on you time-wasting politicians who can't achieve cross-party support for such an integral piece of legislation that literally shapes Aotearoa.
And I just want people to really think about it – if we had to stop doing anything any time there was the possibility of change, nothing would get done ever, in any sector.
Won't it save money though?
Will it? RMA reform minister Chris Bishop certainly hasn't provided any evidence for that. It's just kicking the can down the road, just like rates rises. The press release said the government was stopping councils 'wasting their officers' time and their ratepayers money'. But this doesn't consider all the time that has already been spent by the community engaging in these processes. The meetings they've attended, the documents they've read, the feedback they've written, the list goes on. It also ignores the fact that the bulk of work that feeds into a plan change process is business-as-usual work – technical inputs, monitoring, staying on top of legislative and technological advancements etc. We don't just wake up one day and go 'oh maybe we'll go nuts and change the rules for no reason, and how about we spend a bunch of money on some brand new stuff that isn't needed or useful for any other purpose and that we definitely don't already have' and then crack on with no checks and balances.
Can't you just apply for an exemption to continue?
HA HA HA HA HA. Good one. Technically, yes. But it's essentially not an option given the (deliberate?) timing of this news so close to local government elections, when councillors are likely to be hesitant to make decisions of this nature. We would also then have to spend the time getting the case together for the exemption, rather than finishing the actual work, which is a neat little no-win situation.
Any final words before you go back to bashing your head against a wall?
The one key thing I really want people to take from this is: whether or not you think the RMA is broken, whether or not we need RM reform, and what form that reform should or shouldn't take, there is literally no need to have a blanket pause on actually managing our resources while that happens. Our politicians, across the spectrum, need to get their shit together and land on a workable, lasting RM system that we actually get to implement, rather than living in this bonkers limbo for the foreseeable future. Our environment, our economy and our lives literally depend on it.