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Last modified: 08 Jun 2022 4:57pm

The Council has approved rezoning of 190 hectares of rural land south of Lincoln for residential development.

The decision at today’s Council meeting (Wednesday 8 June) follows the independent Commissioner’s recommendation to approve the Private Plan Change 69 request (PC69), which Rolleston Industrial Developments Ltd lodged with the Council 18 months ago.

The next step in the process is to publicly notify the Council’s decision.

“Those who submitted during the public consultations, and the applicants, will have 30 days to make an appeal to the Environment Court against the Council’s decision”, says Council’s Environmental and Regulatory Services Group Manager Tim Harris.

If an appeal is received, the Environment Court will hold the hearings and make the final decision.

The Council ran two rounds of public consultation on the private plane change request, and received 255 submissions and seven further submissions. A total of 66 submitters gave evidence at the subsequent hearings.

“In response to Council’s and submitters’ concerns a number of changes have been made to the original request,” Mr Harris says.

These changes include a reduction in the number of possible residential sites, from around 2,000 to around 1,700; more commercial land that can cater for community and educational facilities; and changes to address traffic volumes.

Since 2020 when the National Policy Statement On Urban Development (NPS-UD) was introduced the Council has received an unprecedented number of private plan change requests for rezoning land across the district – in total 16 which, if all approved, would enable around 10,000 further residential sites across the eastern areas of the district.

Without the NPS-UD the Council would have likely rejected most, if not all, of the private plan change requests before they had continued to be processed. This is because they wouldn’t have met the provisions of the Regional Policy Statement.

“We are required to process private plan change requests, such as PC69, as a result of the new national policy framework.”

More information on private plan change 69 .