Clarity and confidence in strict City Plan
Gold Coast suburbs can try to meet population growth demands while still maintaining integrity of lifestyle thanks to tough enforcement of a comprehensive City Plan, according to Sherpa Property Group CEO, Christie Leet. Mr Leet said there was a sense of clarity and purpose around the City Plan from the high level “master plan” to the smallest of details and the Gold Coast City Council was prepared to enforce it.
“Comprehensive guidelines have evolved over decades to clearly define what the expectations are and that enables the council to make very clear decisions,” he said. “Projects either meet the requirements or they don’t and, if they don’t, the council demands changes.”
Past development of the Gold Coast was often criticised for being out of control and being a free-for-all and lacking forward thinking. As a result, a lot of investment came into the city, which could be seen as a good thing, but it sometimes came at the expense of the big picture.
Mr Leet said the Gold Coast of today had a clear big-picture vision and the City Plan provided a guide on how to bring it to fruition and ensure everyone was on the same page.
“From a developer’s point of view, it gives you a lot of certainty, despite the guidelines being very restrictive in nature,” he said. “If you abide by the strict guidelines and your development is feasible, then you can be quite confident of seeing the project through to completion. The local community should be proud of how diligent the council has been at enforcing guidelines and protecting their future interests.”
The City Plan spells out the conditions under which a development can be simply “code assessed” and other circumstances where the project must be “impact assessed” and approved by the council. The plan clearly spells out features like height limits for code assessment and then “uplift” or extended height limits where the project requires impact assessment.
Projects using uplift provisions are sometimes confused as being “outside the City Plan” because they don’t fit code assessable guidelines. But they do meet the guidelines for impact assessable projects, which are also spelt out in the City Plan.
The Council and Planning and Environment Court, have consistently held the view that the City Plan is the reflection of the public interest in the appropriate development of land. The City Plan provisions allow development to exceed the mapped building heights up to a maximum of 50%.
This is most recently evident through the 10 June 2022, Planning and Environment Court Judgement relating to a development application seeking approval in Mermaid Beach for an increase of 50% above the mapped building height for the site. The Court dismissed the third-party appeal and determined that the development achieved the relevant provisions of the City Plan. Through this Judgement, the Court also determined that the 914 objections to the development application were not enough to outweigh the intent for building height of up to 50% above the building height map.
Mr Leet said even though the design of Perspective Nexus, a Sherpa project approved earlier this year, was based on uplift guidelines in the City Plan, the council took a strict view and required further visual amenity and architectural merit before it could be approved.
“Our core value of ‘less is more’ means our projects are well aligned with the guidelines anyway, but sometimes things need a bit of tweaking to ensure lines are not crossed,” he said. “With Nexus, there was no flexibility or negotiation, which is a great credit to the council, and the enhancements they required probably cost close to $2 million at a time when the project was already sold out.
While vigorous prosecution of the guidelines makes it more difficult to get a project approved and sometimes added some extra cost, the bigger picture meant greater value for the new owners, knowing the integrity of their City Plan is preserved.”