A major developer has voiced his outrage at Wagga City Council over its allegedly "incredibly slow and bureaucratic" approvals process.
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Graeme Croft, of Croft Developers, lodged a planning application back in December 2018 to turn the old Charles Sturt University campus into a large aged care home, but is still waiting for council to give him the green light.
"It just sits there, nothing happens. There's no drive within council to make this happen," he said.
"It's just in stark contrast to the dealings we have with councils in Victoria and Perth, where they're incredibly proactive, but there just doesn't seem to be any drive in the top end in Wagga."
Mr Croft said the project was worth about $50 million for the local economy and would generate 170 locals jobs and attract $9 million in yearly government funding, with another follow-up subdivision on the horizon.
He said the team was "shovel ready", but just needed council to approve the independent environmental reports, which he claimed council officers had not even looked at over the course of three weeks.
However, the council's city development manager, Paul O'Brien, said those claims were "not true", saying that officers had indeed read the reports and were working through them.
Mr O'Brien said the report had brought up some "concerns" in relation to contamination on the site, saying that council needed time to work on these problems.
"We just need to overcome these environmental hurdles so we can ensure that going into the future the site is suitable for the people who are going to live there," Mr O'Brien said.
"We will work with the applicant to have a mutually agreed and beneficial outcome."
Mr O'Brien said the report was reviewed by the assessing planner, who referred it to the environmental team, who will be finishing the review within the next week.
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Mr Croft said council had previously reassured him that the plan would be ticked off by May 2019, but that 12 months later they were still waiting around for council to fill in its forms.
He said this was typical of NSW councils, which he claimed were predictably slower and more bureaucratic than their other state counterparts he had worked with.
He said the Victorian and Western Australian councils had been particularly keen to fast-track big development applications into their town, but said that did not happen with NSW councils.
"I wouldn't have thought there would be many applications of such a nature [in Wagga] - it's going to be a big employer. I would have thought council would want to get off their backside," Mr Croft said.
"Even before all of this [coronavirus] Wagga has been incredibly slow. It's just bureaucratic, and there's nobody driving it."
Mr O'Brien said he found it hard to believe that council would have made any such promise of a May 2019 date, particularly when a full assessment had not even been done.
"I can't envisage that council would tie itself to a date when the full details of the application aren't at hand," he said.
Mr O'Brien said many issues had since come to light that made the process more difficult, including several fires at the old Charles Sturt University campus that set several asbestos-filled buildings alight and complicated matters.
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However, Mr O'Brien said he was confident that the application would eventually get the approval, and that council was keen to get more developments into the city on principle.
"Council is obviously very supportive of development within the Wagga local government area, and we do everything we can to work with developers and applicants to make the development assessment process as smooth as we can possibly make it," Mr O'Brien said.
"I would encourage applicants that feel they are having an issue with the timeliness of their assessment to contact council, contact myself directly so I can work with them and the assessment town planner to work out what issues there might be and what we can do to make what we do better."
Once complete, the development will be a 144-bed aged care home, with another large subdivision to follow.