Fees and charges

When you apply for your resource consent, you will need to pay any costs involved in assessing and processing your application. These costs will be charged whether your application is granted or declined. Some types of applications have a standard, fixed fee but most applications are charged on an "actual costs" basis. In those cases, we ask for a deposit before we begin processing your resource consent application.

If you pay a deposit, rather than a fixed fee, the deposit will not usually cover the full cost of processing the application, and further costs will be incurred at the rate shown in the Scale of Charges.

It's very likely that we will issue you an invoice at the end of the process for extra costs.
These costs will vary depending on:

• the potential environmental impacts of your activity,
• the quality and completeness of your application, and
• the amount of staff time needed to process and assess your consent.

When the balance owing is more than $1,000 (excluding GST) an end-of-month interim invoice will be sent.
A final invoice is sent once your application has been fully processed.

If your application is returned as incomplete then you will be charged for the time taken to consider the application and return it to you.

The latest scale of charges are as below.

Resource Management Act – Section 36 Charges

Set out below are details of the amounts payable for those activities to be funded by fees and charges, as authorised by Section 36(1) of the Resource Management Act 1991.

Resource Consent application fees

Note that the fees shown below are a deposit to be paid on lodgement of a consent application and applications for exemptions in respect of water measuring devices. The deposit will not usually cover the full cost of processing the application, and further actual and reasonable costs are incurred at the rate shown in the scale of charges. GST is included in all fees and charges. Costs for applications are typically invoiced at the end of process.

Pre-Application work

We offer a pre-application service to help customers. The first 30 minutes of pre-application advice or review of application documents is free of charge. We will always advise before we start charging for application advice. For larger pre-application projects we may invoice before, during, and after the process is complete. Fees payable for pre-application work carried out before a consent application is lodged with Council will be incurred at the rates shown in the scale of charges.

Notes:

1. For additional permits in respect of the same site, activity, applicant, time of application, and closely related effect as the first application.

2. The deposit payable shall be 90% of the cost of a hearing as calculated by Council in accordance with information contained in the application file and using the scale of charges. The amount payable will be due at least 10 working days before the commencement of the hearing. If the amount is not paid by the due date, then the Council reserves the right under S36(7) of the Resource Management Act to stop processing the application. This may include cancellation of the hearing.
   
   Should a hearing be cancelled or postponed due to the non-payment of the charge, the applicant will be invoiced for any costs that arise from that cancellation or postponement.
   
   Following completion of the hearing process, any shortfall in the recovery of hearing costs will be invoiced, or any over recovery will be refunded to the applicant.

3. Where actual and reasonable costs are less than the deposit paid, a refund will be given.

4. Where an applicant requests under s100A (for a consent hearing) or under s357AB (for the hearing of an objection) an independent commissioner(s); the applicant will be required to pay any increase in cost of having the commissioner(s).

You need to pay the initial application fee (deposit) when you submit your application. You can pay at any of our offices or online.

We must follow the steps in the RMA when we are processing a consent and each step has costs associated with it. Information about the process can be found here. For ‘standard’ applications that are not notified and do not need a hearing, your costs will relate to:

• Entering your application into our database.
• Our time reading and auditing the application to see if it is complete or not.
• If needed, an audit of the technical information in your application and your assessment of effects. If a technical audit is needed is decided based on the level of risk associated with your application.
• Deciding if we need further information about your application or not. If this is the case, you will be charged for the time taken to write this letter.
• Writing reports on if your application about if it needs to be notified or not and if it can be approved or not. Most applications are not notified and are approved, but we still need to make a decision on notification. We use template reports to try and reduce the time taken to complete this step, but all applications are different and must be assessed individually.
• Writing consent conditions relating to your activity. We have standard conditions we use, but again each application is different, and we need to ensure we put the right conditions on your consent.
• Making and reviewing a notification and final decision on your application. This decision is made by a qualified decision maker.
• Issuing the consent to you and then finalising it in our database.

There are other steps that contribute to the costs of processing the consent, which include: communication with you and any consultants working for you; asking you to provide written approvals and site visits when needed.

Please note: as a general rule the more complete an application is the less time is taken by staff in processing, which leads to lower overall costs.

If an application is limited or publicly notified, then the costs for processing it will increase as more work is needed. These additional costs can relate to holding a hearing, preparing a hearing report and evidence and costs for a decision maker. In general, we will not pass any legal costs onto you, however if they are a technical expert involved in a hearing then these costs may be passed onto you.

If your application does go to a hearing, we will provide you with an estimate of costs and seek that you pay a further deposit to cover part of these costs (see notes 2 and 4). You will also be invoiced at the end of the process for any other processing costs.

One of the best ways to reduce application costs is to talk to us as early on as possible about your application and what you are proposing to do. This is called a pre-application meeting, or pre-application review of your application.

Talking to us about your proposal before you start your application is strongly encouraged for all application types. We find that it can sort out any issues before the application comes in and lets you know what type of information we need. We are also happy to visit your site before the application comes in to help understand the proposal.

You can contact us  with any consent questions or request a pre-application discussion on public.enquiries@orc.govt.nz or 0800 474 082. You can find out more about this here.

Other ways you can help reduce the costs involved in processing your application by doing the following:

• Talking with any person, group or party who may be affected by your proposal. Record their views, and get written approvals from them if possible.
• Making sure you apply for all the resource consents that your proposal requires.
• Fully completing all the consent application forms.
• Including all the required supporting information.
• If we ask you for any further information, get all of it back to us as soon as you can.
• There may be submissions against your application. Do as much as you can to resolve the issues.
• If your proposed activity looks like it might be large and complex, with the potential to widely affect the environment and/or other people, then you should look at getting professional advice from an environmental consultant.

We set our fees and charges each year during our annual and long term planning processes. The schedule of fees and charges is taken from this year's annual plan, and details this year's fixed application charges, staff charge rates and resource consent holder charges.

Following the granting of a consent, a subsequent review of consent conditions may be carried out at either the request of the consent holder, or as authorised under Section 128, as a requirement of Council. Costs incurred in undertaking reviews requested by the consent holder will be payable by the consent holder at the rates shown in the Scale of Charges above.

Reviews initiated by Council will not be charged to consent holders.

1.  Performance Monitoring

The following charges will apply to the review of performance monitoring reports for all consent holders, except those listed in ‘Fees for Specific Consent Holders’ section below. The charges shown are annual fixed fees per performance monitoring report or plan and are inclusive of GST.

* Charge for monitoring sites established by the ORC specifically to monitor consented activities in relation to river flows.

1.6  Set Fees for Specific Consent Holders

Fees for Specific Consent Holders Performance monitoring fees will be charged as 75% of actual costs to major consent holders. Major consent holders are those that hold a large number of individual consents or where a consent contains complex monitoring requirements where applying the fixed charges listed above do not represent a fair and reasonable charge.

Additional charges may be incurred for new consents granted during the year.

2.  Resource consent audits

Monitoring compliance with consents and audit of resource consents will be charged at the actual and reasonable cost incurred using the Scale of Charges. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Staff time to carry out an inspection (if required), audit any monitoring information provided by consent holders, follow up any non-compliance and report back to consent holders (if required)
• Any disbursements related to the monitoring, including sampling and testing costs and any specialist or technical advice needed

Resource consent non-compliance

Where non-compliance with resource consent conditions is identified, all follow-up work and enforcement action related to the consent non-compliance will be charged at the Scale of Charges.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Staff time to consider the non-compliance, prepare reports and correspondence, and any disbursements (eg sampling services, technical advice) related to consent non-compliance
• Costs for generating and issuing enforcement notices
• Inspections to determine compliance with an enforcement order or abatement notice to confirm that the required action has been taken and full compliance with the notice is achieved
• Reactive site visits as a result of an incident notification (eg a complaint about water pollution or odour discharge), the consent holder is only charged if the consent is breached and non-compliance is observed
• Costs for external consultants/contractors (actual charges)

Other Compliance Activities

The following activities will be charged at the actual and reasonable cost incurred, using the Scale of Charges:

• Performance and compliance monitoring of permitted activities under a National Environmental Standard, including but not limited to Freshwater, Plantation Forestry and Storing Tyres Outdoors
• Monitoring compliance of farm operators with freshwater farm plan regulations and receiving
  notifications and audit reports of freshwater farm plans
• Monitoring Compliance Certificates

Non-Compliance, Incidents and Complaints

Pollution incidents and non-compliance with permitted activity rules

Where non-compliance with the RMA or permitted activity rules in Regional Plans or National Environment Standards is identified, the actual and reasonable costs and expenses incurred may be charged at the Scale of Charges. This includes, but is not limited to:

Dealing with initial response to the pollution incident such as initial enquiries and site visit.

• Enforcement work including staff time for investigating, monitoring and reporting and any disbursements (eg, sampling services and technical advice) related to the non-compliance
• Costs of any actions required to avoid, remedy, or mitigate the adverse environmental effect, including
  the remediation and clean-up

Gravel Inspection and Management

Gravel extraction fee – $0.66 per cubic metre (incl. GST). Where more than 10,000 cubic metres of gravel is extracted within a prior notified continuous two-month period, the actual inspection and management costs will be charged, as approved by the General Manager Corporate Services and CFO.

Resource Monitoring

Water or air monitoring work carried out for external parties - Scale of Charges.

Private Plan Changes

Work undertaken on privately initiated plan changes - Scale of Charges.

Contaminated Site Management

Clean up and remediation works - Scale of Charges.