Ratepayer fights council consultant's $197 charge for 'forwarding an ...

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Rodney man Dave Crow will dispute what he has called “ridiculous charges” in a hearing before council commissioners on July 26. (File photo)

After a challenge from an irate Rodney ratepayer, Auckland Council has admitted some costs charged by its consultants were “not entirely” reasonable.

Charges included $197 – the rate for one hour – for forwarding a message.

“It is a good thing I was sitting down when I opened this email [detailing charges for resource consents]. That amount is ridiculous and completely unjustified,” Kaukapakapa’s Dave Crow wrote in a formal objection to the charges.

“Some $16,000 or so for the council to process a resource consent to build a house in a location where a prior resource consent stipulated it had to be built is nothing other than a rort.”

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Crow’s complaint prompted an audit of a long list of charges he incurred across two resource consent applications. It was carried out by independent reviewer Carne Blandy – another consultant.

Blandy identified several inflated costs, including one charge for forwarding an email, billed at the standard rate of $197.40 an hour.

“The one-hour correspondence charge would likely to have been to forward the s92 request [for information] via an email to the council and the applicant. This could not have taken more than 0.5 hours,” Blandy wrote.

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Dave Crow said his property was sold to him with a resource consent for a house, but after realising he needed consent for wastewater discharge, he had to apply for another one – and it cost him around $16,000.

Blandy also criticised a four-hour charge for a site visit to the Kaipara Coast property, calling it “excessive”.

“From her Newmarket offices the [consultant’s] return trip should take 1.50 hours... given that relevant site information was provided in the application, I recommend that a one-hour on-site inspection time should suffice.”

Blandy also identified a $694.31 charge that had accidentally been billed twice, in invoices in December and January.

All in all, Blandy has recommended that the council waive $3366 in fees previously billed to Crow, which staff have conceded would be appropriate in a resulting report.

However, Crow has pressed ahead with his formal objection which will be presented at a hearing before commissioners in July. He said he was determined to get a line by line explanation for charges.

“We have a suspicion that, as costs are simply on-charged, no one within the council bothers to check whether the [consultant’s] charges are legitimate,” he said in the complaint.

One of Crow’s consent applications was to retain a vehicle access from State Highway 16 to his property, which had already been built by KiwiRail in service of a maintenance project.

“As such it should simply have been a ‘rubber stamp’ as ALL THE WORK had already been done. We are of the opinion that NO work should have been required by the council,” he wrote.

Yet, the council charged Crow $2829 for the application, according to its documents.

Blandy described it as “a simple and uncontentious application” in his review.

“The amount of time charged to assess the application (4.50 hours) and to compile the notification and decision reports (6.50 hours) is unwarranted.”

Under the Resource Management Act, councils are allowed to on-charge “additional charges” they incur in assessing a resource consent application on top of fixed costs, including charges from consultants.

However, applicants also have the right to dispute them.