This article is from page 4 of the 2006-02-07 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
AN EAST CLARE man has hit out at claims by Clare County Council that a new electronic scanning system has speeded up the process of applying for planning permission.
The use of the new system has resulted in more than half of the planning applications received by the local authority in December being ruled invalid.
But the council has defended the system saying that it speeds up the process in the long run.
An angry Killaloe man, who has been trying to sell a site, told The Clare People that this had not been his experience.
“The people who want to buy my site applied for planning permission on it and were told 24 hours before the reply period expired that their application was invalid and they would have to start again. These people applied on December 14 and they were told on January 15 that there was a problem with the application and they would have to go back to the start. Even allowing for the holiday, that’s a whole month and just one day inside the period they had to have a site notice up. And that was just to tell them the applications wasn’t valid. If that’s speeding things up, I’d hate to see the council’s system on a go-slow”, the landowner said.
He asked not to be named so as not to identify the site in question, but added that he was “very frustrated not just because the site is being sold subject to planning permission, but also for the people who are trying to get a house built. I can’t see any reason for that kind of a delay.”
The planning office received 90 applications during the month of December . Of these 49 were ruled invalid.
Twenty five were deemed unacceptable due to mistakes in the newspaper advertisement, 14 site notices were inaccurate, 35 drawings were invalid, 18 had problems with maps and 17 other applications had miscellaneous problems.
December was the first month that all applications were scanned.
Previously, staff would phone the agent who applied on behalf of a client, to let them know if there were mistakes and this allowed the agent to resubmit a valid application.
But the scanning system automatically register applications and rejects as invalid any which have mistakes.