Re: Re: Irish Architects & Society
@Devin wrote:
What can I say? Utterly crazy. Yes the planning system is deeply flawed, but a solution of more restrictive measures on third party involvement, increased discretion for local authorities and faster turn around times? I don’t think so!!
Councils are granting everything at the moment to get the levies in. Everybody knows that important schemes need to go to An Bord Pleanala because there and only there do you get rigorous planning assessment and consistency. Yes the system is crazy and slow but your alternate vision is terrifying.
Architects would not in any case end up going to local authority planning departments because the existing planners are twiddling their thumbs with the decrease in planning apps. There was even a suggestion in the paper recently that they could be redeployed as An Bord inspectors to help with the perrenial backlog there.
And yes, suddenly dropping “vindictive tossers” into your post reeks of a sour grapes situation. Dante labelled the grapes he could not reach sour.
my dislike of An Taisce is as well documented as your defence of them. They are programmed to object and have a pool of standard objections that they apply depending on design, scale, height or location. The declining standard of their arguments is tangible.
Anyway, I don’t really understand what your problem is with cutting timescales – why should it take 5 weeks to write a letter? Why should our time be wasted by people with a barely hidden (financial) agenda? Why should it take 8 weeks to review a medium size scheme? why can’t ABP just adjudicate within their stated timescale? radical maybe but not “utterly crazy”
My issue with all the above is much more than sour grapes – 2 friends of mine were let go simply because their company could no longer wait for ABP to make a decision on a scheme that the Client really wants to build despite the downturn. They are now at 27 weeks with no discernible end in sight which is just a joke. If I stuck to deadlines the way our representative bodies do then I wouldn’t have a company to worry about.
