The Thames-Coromandel District Council has established a new committee to provide guidance and direction over appeals to its new district plan to be released in April.

Three people have been appointed to the new District Plan Appeals Committee which includes deputy mayor Peter French, Mercury Bay councillor Tony Fox and independent Auckland-based planning consultant Ian Munro.

When the decisions of the new district plan are released, along with plan submissions, submitters will have 30 working days to lodge appeals with the Environment Court on any topic they have submitted on.

The current district plan was notified in 1997 and became fully operative in 2010 after a lengthy series of appeals – of which 51 appeals were lodged with the Environment Court.

'Unlike district courts, the Environment Court is not purely adversarial and it utilises alternative dispute resolution methods like mediation and expert conferencing,” explains council.

'Usually this means only a few appeals are likely to continue to the Environment Court, and the scope's often limited to where the parties have been unable to reach agreement.”

Once all appeals are lodged, they will be presented to council along with information about each appeal's complexity, degree of difference from council's plan decisions, and whether resolution is likely prior to Environment Court hearings.

Council says its District Plan team will then case-manage the appeals with assistance from its in-house lawyers.

'These staff will coordinate negotiations, mediations, correspondence and meetings with appellants and the Environment Court.

'External lawyers may be brought in to represent Council in Environment Court hearings and for larger more complex mediation topics such as mining and landscape.”

The job of the newly-created District Plan Appeals Committee will then be to guide and advise the appeals process, whether in negotiation, private mediation or court-assisted mediation.

In the interim, council has also delegated the Group Manager Governance, Planning and Strategy with the authority to sign Environment Court consent orders on behalf of the council as respondent.

For more information visit the Thames-Coromandel District Council's District Plan Review webpage.