Maitland City Council should be more flexible with developers if it wants to breathe new life into the city centre, a Maitland councillor says.
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Cr Arch Humphery believes development requirements in central Maitland are too rigid.
He said conditions put on developers had made projects financially unviable in the past and caused developers to walk away.
“The DA is put in and the variations start and conditions are put on [the proposed development] by council’s planning department,” Cr Humphery said.
“These issues have nothing to do with being technical. We need to be flexible and use commonsense and understand what a financially viable development is all about.”
He raised the issue at last week’s council meeting where he said the city had missed out on tens of millions of dollars from missed development opportunities in central Maitland in recent years.
The comments brought a rebuke from the mayor of Maitland, Cr Peter Blackmore, who challenged Cr Humphrey to name the missed opportunities, which he did not at the time.
There have been 60 development consents granted in the central Maitland and Horseshoe Bend precinct since 2012, according to council figures.
A council spokeswoman said no development applications for that area had been refused during that time.
But Cr Humphery told the Mercury yesterday that it was not a matter of DAs being refused.
He said his concern was the financial impact of staff imposed conditions placed on development proposals related to height restrictions, floor space and other aspects.
Cr Humphery said plans for 26 river-front apartments and retail space at the former Roads and Transport Authority site near Maitland library, a decade ago, was a good example.
Car parking and the shape of the building were sticking points during negotiations, he said, before the plan was abandoned.
“This would have been the first, high-quality unit block on the river and it became financially unviable,” he said.
“I’m about bringing things to Maitland that Maitland needs.”
Council general manager David Evans reminded councillors during Tuesday’s debate that their role was to set policy framework, not to help developers overcome problems on a case-by-case basis.
