Mribunal decides not to change classifications

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 9

Mribunal decides not to change classifications

Two Planning Tribunal decisions will help affect the future of a special Christchurch City Council inner-city residential zone. In one decision, the tribunal said that zoning of the Devon Private Hotel building at 69 Armagh Street should remain Residential SA. The owner of the property, Mr D. H. Godfrey, had sought a commercial zoning so that the building could some day be used for professional offices. The building is leased for use as a private hotel until 1988.

In the other decision, the tribunal said that a vacant site at 58 Armagh Street, near Cranmer Square, now used for car-parking, should retain commercial zoning granted on appeal when the site was owned by Air New Zealand.

City Council planners had approved the site’s use for a future two-storey commercial building that could house professional offices and a contact lens manufacturing and supply business. The City Council had decided that the site itself should revert to a Residential 5A zone, which would make the office building uses non-conforming and provide some limit to their future development. The tribunal said the council sought an extension of the inner-city residential zone into a zone that had been commercial for some nine years. In the public interest, the property-owners were entitled to some measure of zoning certainty for the future, the tribunal said. It was not in the public interest that a developer

should be encouraged by the provisions of a scheme to purchase a site with a particular development in mind, receive approval for that development to proceed, and then have the zoning changed in a way as to make that development immediately non-conform-ing, said the decision. In the Devon Private Hotel case, it had been argued that commercial space would be needed by lawyers wanting to work near the new law courts complex. The decision said the City Council had provided ample commercial zoning, not all of which was immediately adjacent to the law courts complex. It was sufficiently close to make it useful for those who wanted to establish offices associated with the court buildings.