Peninsula News launches Peninsula planning portal
Peninsula News has launched a planning portal for the Peninsula to address residents' frustrations with the Central Coast Council's planning portal.
The Peninsula News portal contains only Peninsula applications and is designed to avoid the delays and timeouts which residents have found problematic since the Council "upgraded" its portal over Christmas.
It contains a list of applications lodged with the Council since the start of last year, drawn from the Council's portal.
Unlike the council's portal, the Peninsula portal provided direct access to relevant documents such as the Statement of Environmental Effects and the notification plans, said Peninsula News editor Mr Mark Snell.
It also provided direct links to the Council's submission pages and details page, which included for example the name of the planning officer.
The portal had a filter on the status of applications, and recorded the date a status changes to "advertising" as the approximate start date for the advertising period.
The council portal does not contain this information.
Mr Snell said that members of the Peninsula Residents' Association had been seeking improvements to the portal since the start of the year.
"While some improvements have been made by Council and are continuing, it is clear that the structural reasons for the bottlenecks and timeouts are not about to change any time soon.
"In the meantime, this gives us and the community a more responsive and useful application."
He said that the portal was created and maintained as a community service by local volunteers.
All queries about details of specific development applications should be directed to Council staff, he said.
SOURCE:
Media release, 13 Jun 2022
Mark Snell, Peninsula News