Tauranga's future growth assessed

A major reappraisal of the Western Bay's growth document SmartGrowth takes place today to ensure the supply of land for housing stayed well ahead of demand.

The strategy on where growth takes place over the next 30 years threatens to become unstuck because of the long timeframes needed to bring land to the point where development could begin.

A proposal to select two or three growth areas for early development comes only a month after Smart Growth's joint councils implementation committee adopted the "Settlement Pattern Review Project Plan".

The plan sets out the tasks that needed to be completed in order to identify where growth should take place. But "recent pressures" have led to a rethinking of these "agreed approaches" to see if they could be achieved quicker.

Pressures on the growth strategy were detailed to today's committee meeting by SmartGrowth's "locum" implementation manager Ken Tremaine. He replaces Justine Brennan who resigned recently to take a job with the Tauranga City Council.

Mr Tremaine said there was a need to ensure a minimum of 10 years of zoned land was available at all times. The other pressure came from the Government asking the Productivity Commission to investigate ways to improve the way councils regulated to make land available for housing.

He said that once the settlement pattern review reached the stage of identifying additional growth areas, the SmartGrowth partners could look at selecting two or three growth areas for fast-tracking.

"Once this is done, we can then investigate the balance of the growth areas."

Mr Tremaine said criteria would be developed to identify which growth areas should be developed in the next 10 to 20 years.

He said the SmartGrowth technical implementation group had flagged the need to revise and perhaps shorten the steps in the project plan. "The ideal would be to have this work on the two or three growth areas completed by early 2015."

Mr Tremaine said they needed to send early signals to the councils and developers in order to allow detailed infrastructure planning to take place. This planning was likely to take about two years and was needed before changes could be made to regional and district councils' plans.

"We do not want to predetermine any outcomes but we do need to take a pragmatic approach."

The time between settlement pattern decisions and resource consent was normally about five years. His report also revealed that the implementation committee had agreed to work with the Productivity Commission as a field site.