Adelaide City Council has rejected cuts to its planning powers outlined in the interim report of the State Government’s Expert Panel on Planning Reform.

The report, which proposed a complete overhaul of the South Australian planning system, suggested the establishment of an independent state planning commission and several regional planning boards, as well as a legislated charter of citizen participation in planning.

The regional boards would subsume some of the planning powers currently held by local councils.

In a decision passed last Thursday, the council rejects the idea of regional boards, claiming that they would reduce the influence of local residents – via the council – on planning decisions.

“Once you take things away from local council and put them into regional bodies, you effectively cut out the local community’s input,” said councillor David Plumridge.

“Planning is about people and how it affects people at the very localised level.

“Local government is there for that very purpose.”

The regional boards suggested in the panel’s report would include members representing local and state government.

However, the report lacks detail on how much representation local government would get.

It also doesn’t specify how large the ‘regions’ of the state would be nor how many councils would be covered by each of them.

Adelaide City Council is concerned the regional boards would not contain enough representatives from councils to ensure the voice of local people is heard.

“Unless the planning boards have good representation of local councils, it will effectively cut out the voice of local people, so that’s a real concern to us,” Plumridge said.

“It could be good, but there’s a real threat to the impact of local input into planning policy decision-making.”

In a draft form of the council’s submission to the Expert Panel on Planning Reform, it questions why councils would agree to help fund regional boards if their representation on them was unsatisfactory.

But Plumridge said it was unlikely that Adelaide City Council would deal itself out of having a voice on regional boards by withholding funding.

“I don’t think that council’s ever going to say we won’t take part, we’ll have to take part.”

The panel’s report also suggests regional development assessment panels, which would take powers out of the hands of the Development Assessment Commission, as well as council development assessment panels.

The regional assessment panels would be populated exclusively with planning experts.

Those experts would be given accreditation by a joint local-state government subcommittee through professional organisations.

The report argues that political influence should be removed from the assessment of individual projects.

“To ensure integrity in the assessment process, political considerations should have limited influence over individual decisions,” it reads.

“There is a clear desire to promote regional (as opposed to local) development assessment panels while ensuring local planning objectives are appropriately considered.”

Plumridge said allowing “technocrats” exclusive rights to make development assessment decisions would be an even stronger blow to community representation than the establishment of regional boards.

“That would be a very, very detrimental step,” he said.

“It would take away from the assessment process all the voices of the community and that’s just anathema to what we need.”

“We will have to oppose that quite strongly.

“I disagree with the underlying assumption that somehow elected members on assessment panels is political intervention.

“Planning assessment has to include local knowledge (and) local influence of the community through the elected members.”

Plumridge also expressed concern about a total audit of all heritage listings suggested in the report.

“When you talk about doing an audit, that implies that there’s something to be taken out or taken away,” he said.

“What we would want to make sure that … we don’t in anyway diminish the existing list of heritage properties in character areas.”

Despite those concerns, Adelaide City Council is supporting most of the other suggestions from the report.

In particular, the council supports the establishment of a state planning commission – which would subsume many of the powers of the state Planning Minister – as well as a citizen’s participation charter.

“The proposal to have a state planning commission is seen as a very positive move … because it looks to me to be a chance to depoliticise the process,” said Plumridge.

“Currently lots of things are decided by the minister and the minister alone.”

Plumridge said many of the suggestions in the report would help to streamline the planning system.

“The council is very supportive of the need for planning reform.”