Council defied: house may be demolished

Press, 25 August 1979, Page 1

Council defied: house may be demolished

By BRIAR CAMBOURN A house completed in defiance of two stop-work notices may have to be pulled down. The house, in Pentre Place on the Cashmere Hills, was built without a building permit in breach of a Heathcote County Council by-law. Some of its foundations are in severerisk land. A contract for the sale of the house was signed two months ago. but the council refused to connect services, and the buyer could not move in. The council has now been told by its legal advisers that it must connect services, but it still plans to oppose occupancy until it gets an unequivocal assurance from a qualified authority that the house is safe.

Failing this, it plans to use powers under the Town and Country Planning Act, and its district scheme code of ordinances, to condemn the house and demolish it — occupied or not.

If it is occupied, the council says, the occupant will be settling with the builder, not the council. The council refuses to certify that the house is safe.

The Heathcote County Engineer says he issued two stop-work notices on the builder, Mr G. A. Taylor, when he continued building in contravention of a height by-law, and without a permit. The permit was with-held because of the breach of the by-law. He says Mr Taylor ignored the notices. Mr Taylor says the council issued him with a permit for an hour, then withdrew it. He says he was “a victim” of the council’s district scheme review. At the time he was building, the council was granting special dispensations on the height by-law he was breaking, because it was too stringent. It also intended relaxing that by-law in a pending change to its

district scheme. This would make the house a legal use.

However, an objection from a neighbour disqualified his dispensation, and left him in breach of the by-law if he continued building. Confident of the scheme change, however, he went ahead expecting “the matter to resolve itself.” The buyer “knew the situation” and was in no hurry to take possession, he says. The council says it never issued a building permit. An objection was lodged just after a telephone call to Mr Taylor telling him to come and uplift his permit. A second telephone call withdrew the right, and the permit was never signed by the building inspector.

Because Mr Taylor continued building without a permit, county building inspectors never supervised construction, and are unable to certify that the house is safe. If the council issued a retrospective permit, as Mr Taylor wants, and the house developed a structural defect, the council would become liable for a property worth at least $48,000. The council is not willing to take the risk, particularly as part of the house is on severe-risk land. It has decided that an

independent registered civil engineer — willing to assume liability — must certify the house as safe. It also wants an unqualified assurance from a soil scientist that the severe-risk land supporting the house will not budge — all at the expense of Gavin Taylor, Ltd.

Without these assurances, no building permit will be issued, and the house must come down, the council says. Mr Taylor said yesterday that a registered civil engineer was now writing up a favourable report, and that he had met North Canterbury Catchment Board conditions for excavating severe-risk land. However, the county chairman (Mr J. M. McKenzie) says the council must still be convinced. Mr Taylor plans legal action if the council does not grant a housing permit. The president of the district branch of the Real Estate Institute (Mr T. S. Pasley) says the agent for the house, Binns, Barber and Keenan, Ltd, could not have been expected to know the house had no building permit. “It is accepted as a matter of course that all houses have building permits,” he said. “The onus was on the council to stop the house getting as far as the agent.”