Cumberland City Council welcomes reports that it is among Sydney’s fastest local government areas for processing development applications that are considered by the Regional Panel.
As reported by News Corp, Cumberland was listed as the second quickest assessing Council for development applications to the Regional Panel, following Ryde Council, taking an average of 147 days to assess proposals in the third quarter of the 2019/20 financial year.
This trend reflects recent improvements in the assessment times for local development applications. During the 2019/20 financial year, Cumberland achieved a median processing time of 91 days, which is five days faster than the median processing time in the previous financial year.
“As one of the fast growing areas of Sydney, we’re not making applicants wait for lengthy periods of time to know about the outcome their development proposal,” Mayor Steve Christou said.
“When our Council was established in 2016 following the merger process, we had a significant backlog of development applications.
“However, we have an experienced and dedicated team that has been making improvements to our planning processes, systems and controls and it’s good to see that this is translating into results when it comes to processing times for DAs and that the median processing time continues to go down.
“A lot of the development applications we receive are from mum and dads wanting to do renovations to their home and the Council assesses every application on its merit.”
As a further way to make it easier for applicant, development applications in Cumberland City can now be lodged electronically through the NSW Planning Portal that is managed by the NSW Government. Further information on how to lodge applications on the portal is available on www.planningportal.nsw.gov.au