Tree Protection Status in Tauranga

  

 

The recent amendments to the Resource Management Act (RMA) gained a lot of attention with the provisions to prohibit the blanket protection of trees. Many of you will be familiar with some of the difficulties tree protection causes. The Tauranga City district plan contains a schedule of protected trees. There are around some 1,900 trees on private property to which the schedule applies. Many of these trees would not qualify to be listed using the Council’s own criteria and yet they are protected. A draft plan issued by the Council earlier this year showed its intention to reduce the number of schedule trees to around 170. Potentially this is good news for those of you who have an issue with a large protected tree on your property or on a neighbouring property. A quick look at the Tauranga City Council web page shows that nearly half of all notified applications this year involved the removal of a protected tree. Understandably there is a lot of interest in the Council’s intention reduce the number of protected trees when the district plan is notified in October 2009.

 

 

Unfortunately, the changes to the RMA will work against those of you who benefit from the Tauranga City Council change in policy. The reason for this is a range of new sections in the Act altering when a new rule takes legal effect. Prior to the amendments in the Act, when a new plan was notified the rules were given immediate legal effect. The amendments to the RMA now state that a rule has legal effect only once the decision on submissions relating to the rule is made and publicly notified. Ironically, there is a provision in the Act that rules can have immediate effect where the provision relates to protection of water, air, soil, significant indigenous vegetation or habitats for fauna, heritage or agriculture management. No provision exists when reversing a tree protection schedule.

 

The effect of this policy change is that even if the Tauranga City Council notifies its plan without any protected trees in the schedule, the old or current plan will continue to provide protection to those 1,900 odd trees. Given that Tauranga City Council has in the past defined trimming trees as damaging and required resource consents for this activity, even the new trimming provisions of the amended Resource Management Act will likely fail to provide any relief for people whose property is protected.

 

 

If you have a protected tree on your property, the best advice is to hurry up and wait. It will take around one year for the proposed plan to reach a point where it can be considered the dominant planning instrument and the new amendments no longer hold up the removal of out dated tree protection. From that point in time we would expect that applications for the removal of trees should be dealt with on a non notified basis by the Council.

 

No doubt other anomalies will come out of the wide range RMA reforms. Timely, accurate and strategic advice is essential if you are contemplating any form of development.