Session 3- Development Seminar Proceedings
Chaired by Barry Yardley

Speakers:

Phil Mulvey - Managing Director, Environmental Earth Sciences

Bernie Cohen - Director, Essential Certifiers Pty Ltd

Ralph Miller, Developer Policy Manager, Sydney Water

Tom Jellibrand, Manager, Business Customers, Sydney Water

Barry Yardley

Welcome to session three, Current Development Issues. Okay firstly I'd like to welcome our first speak, Phil Mulvey who is the Managing Director, Principal Soil Scientist and Contaminant Hydrologist with Environmental Earth Sciences. Phil has 20 years experience and has a Degree in Soil Science and a Masters in Hydrogeology (which is ground water). Phil has extensive involvement in contaminant waste and mining industries and is a contaminant land environment auditor. I'd like you to welcome Phil to the stage.


Phil Mulvey - 'Impact of Acid Suplhate Soils on the Development Process'

Just while the screen warms up, I'd like to talk about science and legislation; which many people might view as a marriage of two boring fields. So it's going to be a boring talk. Unfortunately I've got about 60 slides to get through in a very rapidly reducing timeframe. By Monday on the website, which will come up as the last slide, you will find opportunity to download what's going to whip past you at 80 miles an hour. I apologise for that and hope you will find that the offspring of marriage and legislation is not one boring child.

I'd like to cover contaminated sites and the focus of the first part of the talk, acid sulphate soils, which are sort of limited to the people on the coast, and legislation in NSW. So briefly focussing on where is Councils responsibility which then affects yourselves and what they're going to do the first comes in on the Environmental Planning & Assessment Act 145B which basically says the planning authority's saved from being taken to Court, if they make a decision in good faith and good faith says they must follow DUAP guidelines and DUAP guidelines for acid sulphate soils are these, they're about to be reissued and for contaminated sites are SEPP 55 and the planning guidelines for contaminated sites. So Council will refer to those all the time.

You jump down in that legislation to Section 79C where it gives issues to be considered and under soil it lists remediation contaminated soil and management of acid sulphate soil. So really before you can consider any subdivision or development there are issues that require consideration.

What are acid sulphate soils? You've read the news they've killed fish; fishermen, oyster farmers are pretty upset; farmers are upset, they're not quite too sure what the issues about. Acid sulphate soils are a natural substance called pyrites, which when exposed or dug up or drained produces sulphuric acid with a pH less than Coca Cola and once you know what the pH of Coca Cola is you don't want to drink it, its below 2. Chardonnay is about 3.5.

Where do they occur, they occur right round the coast of Australia Adelaide being the slow or South Australia being slow and sleepy actually has developed a whole new type of acid sulphate soil on dry land areas, but effectively you can say all the coast of NSW.

They are laid down and Professor Thom is in the room so he may well remember this particular cross section, they are laid down working your way up from the coast under the flood plain in a series of deposition environments. They can occur both in sand and in mud but are frequently in greater concentration in mud. You all know what mangrove mud is like; that's the material that's unoxidised. Its known as PAS. I only say PAS because I end up with ARSE or ASS depending how you pronounce A S S, so I have to be careful, but potential acid sulphate soils are those that haven't gone off, they're not a problem yet but they will be.

Actual acid sulphate cells are a problem now and then you've got partially oxidised material which is in the process of becoming a problem. The nature in which the form naturally is there an infra red pointer [MOVED AWAY FROM MICROPHONE] you also get a situation in a tidal creek where the pyrite is laid down in salt water sedges behind the mangroves. What happens is that these mangroves have followed the sea out and back depending on where you were in geological time and this material is being laid down under all the coastal areas but typically within 5 metres AHD but not always.

What happens is they age and you end up with a situation where you put drains in you get material that generates acid it goes into the drain, this looks pretty good except some odd [Can't hear] but the effect of the drain is major, you get a lot of fish kills, unfortunately from a tourist's point of view the drain is crystal clear, looks fantastic because the pH is so low everything is dead except acid tolerant macrophites which is grasses. So when you see lovely clear water in those canals in Queensland don't buy the land.

I'll take you quickly through some slides of occurrences, this is mangrove, most of these are in the Sydney catchment area, this is Mangrove Creek as you can see in the back the Casuarinas there has been a push up of the berm to stop seawater coming in and flooding the pasture, Council got involved in this and it went to Court but you've got a scald there and its been sitting there for about 8 years.

In the same area this is Poprin Creek you've got an excavated drain, and once again you can see a scald behind it with also Casuarinas. The pH of that particular water is around about 3 its got iron flock floating in it, its quite crystal clear and it's got the tolerant macroflites.

I don't want to go through too much chemistry but the main bits is pyrite which occurs in the mud plus oxygen plus water gives sulphuric acid and iron. The thing to understand is that you need oxygen and water together. If it's completely dry no reaction, if it's completely wet no reaction.

Little bit more chemistry, basically what happens is the iron that goes into water comes out as iron flock, you may well have seen this beneath excavations where you get the iron flock precipitating out as the iron flock precipitates out it actually generates a lot more acid as this occurs, so the water becomes more acid than the soil.

This is discharge from excavated sand from a development further north and I won't say anything further, I might be sued, you've got a situation where the iron flock is coming out quite readily. That's caused a fair degree of problems not only visually but impacts on the mangroves.

Now is it all gloom? Certainly at the moment one would get the impression that acid sulphate soils is definitely a gloomy situation. The answer is no. You can develop on acid sulphate soils and the government is not of the opinion they should stop development on acid sulphate soils. Naturally acid sulphate soils have shells in them, they have skeletons of micro fauna, and these calcium rich neutralising rich substances also act to buffer the acid that's generated. So you have a natural buffering capacity. What is required for you to assess and what is the Council expected to do? This is all defined within the Acid Sulphate Soil Manual which is issued by DUAP which is about to be updated.

But the first step is identification and luckily the government has made it easy for everyone, they've issued acid sulphate soil maps on the coast and they're available from DLWC (I think they're about $15 each). If you fall in that map as being a risk area then Council will definitely require work of you in any submission and the first lot of work requires a preliminary investigation to establish you are actually on acid sulphate soil areas and if you are it will require detailed mapping.

The maps the DLWC produce are somewhat like this. What you've got here is you've got the sand dune area so you've got acid sulphate soils under that about 10 metres down so it won't affect the development, you've got an area here that's between 3 and 5 metres, you've got an area there less than 2 metres and then you've got Tiligary Creek so you've got an abayment, this is up at Port Stephens. So you've got a situation where if you're looking at development in here you know the Council require acid sulphate soils surveys straight off, if you're looking for development up here it probably won't but if you're excavating potentially into them you've got issues to consider as well.

There are a whole variety of different equipment that's done to sample acid sulphate soils; we have lightweight drill rigs, when we have to get across areas that are fairly boggy, if you break through the peat the material sticks atrophic and I've actually seen drill rigs like this disappear up to the tray and having to have several D7s to actually pull it some distance away to get it out. This is the M5 east and the Cooks River extension, you will see further shots shortly where there's extensive acid sulphate soils resulting in a lot of problems.

You'll get a field assessment produce logs and you're quite familiar with logs from a geotechnical point of view these follow the same format.

At the end of the report you'll come up with a table and this is one of our tables so I can't say its quite DUAP but you've got a situation with risk and no risk where you're dealing with presence of sulphur under different categories of soil due to texture, then you've got a situation where the soil is self neutralising so you have no risk. Then you have moderate risk and in these instances you can develop without many controls, moderate risks you might have to have some controls, and high risk you'll have to have significant controls or potentially advise your clients certain areas cannot be developed.

Mind you in some of these areas you're also in less than 1:100 year flooding and so on there are other constraints as well that often go together.

Other things to be aware of is it can release heavy metals, corrode engineering structures, you get substance it can clog aquafers wells and water ways. If you put pipes for service stations under there these are some of the problems you can get, this is 18 months old. Be aware also that the material when its laid down becomes rock, the sulphides are still there and you can get if you know the Mudgee overpass you can get significant amounts of pyrite occurring at the base of the permium sequence. This is a permium conglomerates. Notice the attack on the pavement there they'll probably have to consider work on that structure of the bridge within 5-6 years, look at the impacts on the rusting of the steel girders, attack on concrete etc. It can be very quick, that orange patch here is actually a mineral alonite but this is on the M2, just at the Epping Road turnoff - just after the tollgates. Have a look when you next go past, it's a nice big yellow spot, it is fairly unusual to see - Hawkesbury sands don't have it but it does occur in small areas. So just be aware of advising for sub divisions just be a little bit conscious of the sulphides in rocks as well.

Management is straight forward, avoidance, prevention, neutralisation, oxidation, leeching, pyrite removal. I can't go into all that quickly but essentially the most favoured option usually by Council and government is, if possible, avoid now clearly most developers aren't so favourable with that option; but if you can't avoid you need to look at other options. Because they're low lying areas, burying if it hasn't become actual acid sulphate soil, in other words put fill over the top can be satisfactory but you need to watch the rise of the water table and the drainage issues on neighbouring properties.

Burying as in digging up and reburying is an excellent treatment opportunity as well. This is bulk excavation from the M5, you can see the nature of the material when compacted, when its uncompacted or unconsolidated its quite jelly-like when its consolidated its quite stiff, but its still highly reactive. This material is dug out, tracked off and placed under the water table in a sand mine perfectly adequate and excellent environmental solution for that situation.

You can neutralise it with lime, flooding is undertaken in Queensland, less so in NSW in seawater using the natural buffering capacity of sea water, the problem with that as an ongoing situation is you pinch the carbonate for the shells to make their bodies to move around in, so you end up with other issues that are a problem.

Oxidation leeching with sand you could rapidly oxidise it then treat it, or you can remove the pyrite by typical mining techniques such as hydrocyclans. If you're in a high risk area even after you've done the development there will be requirements for ongoing monitoring, both ground water and surface water and there will be inspections of structures etc. If you've got canals there will be dredging requirements and there are a lot of issues associated with those so don't think you can walk away from and you need to advise your client that once its done there will be ongoing obligations.

Sorry to rush through that as I said I'll refer you to the website later.

Review of Councils obligations in regard to contaminated land and the audit process. This is topical at the moment because increasingly a lot of Councils are calling for audits all the time and calling for full environmental investigations on dairy paddocks that have never had anything on them. So you need to go through what is the requirements and under Contaminated Land & Planning laws which Council have to refer to before making a decision; its very clear that you only need a Contaminated Lands report where there is reason to suspect contaminated land. Now these days there is reason to expect contaminated land everywhere except two instances, one is complete green fields that have never been developed and the other is sheep and cattle paddocks that have no associated agricultural infrastructure with them.

There is a requirement under SEPP 55 which Councils have to follow to consider contamination, but if you look at point 2 where I've got it in bold, you indicate that Councils have to at the very minimum when there is a change of land use, have a preliminary contamination investigation done. So no matter what if there is any change of land use, Council under SEPP 55 will ask for an environmental site assessment stage 1.

The planning guidelines indicate what that is, it's only to establish whether further work is necessary. So that's all you need to submit for a DA even if further work may be required it can be conditioned under DA.

What is a site audit? A site audit is an independent review by bunnies like me taking responsibility off the Council and the EPI. That's what a site audit is there's a lot more legal jargon about it but essentially we take over the responsibility of saying the site is safe.

There are certain situations when you would have a site audit and its defined within these guidelines. Now the cost of an audit is very expensive, if you look at the cost of a contaminated site investigation to the detail necessarily for an audit, it will cost you a minimum of $8-10,000. If you then have an audit on top of it, it will be in the same price range. So if you're selling off a block of land at Junee that's worth $15,000 and it was a former service station, before you even do anything you've got a $20,000 expenditure. So we have to look at when is a site audit necessary and its very important this be considered. So you need to have ammunition to be able to say to Council refer to SEPP 55 of the Planning Guidelines, an audit is not necessary in this instance because, the three instances stated, audit is necessary when the Council believes information is incorrect or incomplete. Council requires verification proponent has adhered to appropriate guidelines, and Council is unable to undertake its own technical review. This is increasingly becoming less frequent for the standard investigations because Councils have their own review teams.

What's happened recently was a court case late last year Botany Bay City Council versus Lignon 158 Pty Ltd (isn't that a classic developers name, we want to protect our butt and set up a $2 company thats promptly going to retire as soon as this development is done). But the judgment that came out of that was the test as to whether an audit statement is required is based on reasonable ground that the information is incomplete. The judge decided on this basis that the information was delivered by a reputable consultant, it was a member of a consultant group called Australian Contaminated Land Consultants Association, had thoroughly addressed the issue and in the Commission's opinion there was no need for an audit. So this actually has a bearing for all Councils to consider in situations when is an audit necessary.

I apologise for cramming everything in and rushing through I've indicated you'll find a lot more information with that website particularly regarding this paper that will be up by Monday but you'll find 4-5 papers on acid sulphate soils and quite a few papers on planning aspects in NSW & Victoria on contaminated land. You just follow the links when you go into the site to papers and seminars and just take the paper and seminar you want to look at. Sorry to rush through. Our experience in NSW we actually have four officers in NSW (well Canberra) loosely speaking so we have Ballina & Orange, Sydney and Canberra so we're certainly understands the issues associated with development both regionally and within the Sydney metro area. Thanks for your time.


Barry Yardley

Phil has very quickly got us back on track with our timing. Our next speaker is Bernie Cohen. Bernie is a founding director of Essential Certifiers, a pioneering company in private certification of building in NSW. Prior to his private business activity, Bernie had extensive experience in local government working at Liverpool, Parramatta, Bankstown and Canterbury Councils over 20 years. Bernie is a member of the HIA Planning Committee and his presentation is on the Certification System that we are using today. Welcome Bernie.

Sorry, we've got to load up a laptop here at the moment. I understand this will take a minute.

While we're waiting for that would anybody have any questions for Phil regarding the acid sulphate soils.

Gordon Wren

Always good for a question, Ligon 158 P/L won the case not requiring the site audit, wouldn't it be cheaper to do the site audit?

Philip Mulvey

You're quite correct, it would have been cheaper if it was just on the site audit but the consultants recommended no remediation was necessary and Council suggested it was needed, the ground water was contaminated 5 metres down and mediation costs were in the order of several hundred thousand dollars so the consultant was arguing there was no remediation required. Council was saying they wanted a second opinion being the auditor and the Judge said firstly they're in a position to be able to draw information from the consultants report themselves and secondly he agreed that remediation in this instance was unnecessary. Just on that particular site, Botany Bay has a lot of groundwater contamination from one or two areas in particular, industries that have spread under the whole area and this was a regional contamination issue that the site owner was being asked on his site from somebody else's pollution to address by Council even though there was no harm associated with all the occupiers of that site.

Barry Yardley

Okay we'll hold the rest of the questions for Phil for later and we'll get Bernie going, thanks.


Bernie Cohen - 'The Private Certification Process for Residential Constriction in NSW'

Thank you very much good afternoon everybody. I'm Bernie Cohen. I'm the Principal of Essential Certifiers, a certification company which has been operating for about three years in the greater Sydney area. When we talk about the greater Sydney area our company covers areas from Port Stephens to Nowra to the Blue Mountains. We've done the odd job out at Mudgee for certain clients but we try and restrict ourselves to Sydney if we can.

Private certification in NSW was approved in July 1998 by the NSW government. Mainstream building certification did not commence really until February 1999 when the BSAP scheme was approved by DUAP, now BSAP is an organisation called the 'Building Surveyors & Allied Professionals' it's a certification organisation which looks after building surveyors in the whole of Australia. They're based in South Australia and they look after and ensure that the certifiers are doing the right thing in all different States. There are two types of certifiers. The group that I work for are 'accredited certifiers - building' in NSW there are currently 150 people who have that accreditation under BSP. We also have accredited certifiers civil which are certified or controlled by the Institute of Engineers, there are 70 of those in NSW with 7 specifically approved for subdivision so there are only 7 people in that game at the moment. There was a scheme which has been approved by the government for planning but its limited in its introduction due to legislative controls.

Earlier today we had a talk from Kerry Bedford of DUAP and I think there is some expectation from the planners out there that 'Plan First' will deliver them their opportunity to get out and do some certification but time will tell that will probably be 3-4 years away.

Certifiers - building what do they do everybody says. Building certifiers approve construction certificates after the DA consent. That's the old BA after DA essentially the government felt that we needed to streamline the process and get faster approval times out of Council so they moved into the private sector. The other activity that certifiers get into is approving complying development certificates, they are the original BA. There was an expectation from the government and was mooted by the planning methods of today that 80% of the old applications that we dealt with would be dealt with as complying development certificates. Unfortunately, the reality is it's running around about 4% but I'll talk about that later on.

Certifiers - civil; what do they get up, they approve construction certificates after DA consent for civil works eg on site detention, driveways, access ways. They also issue complying component certificates for drainage, road works but these are only on private land and public roads in the majority of council areas. Some councils have by the use of the Roads Act taken back control of gutter crossings, footpath road drainage on their land including Liverpool, Blacktown and Baulkham Hills. When we look at Sutherland Council they've recently written to all the certifiers saying that if an engineer or surveyor wants to work within their area then they will be expected to be accredited. We're still waiting to hear from DUAP whether in fact they're going to be able to do that but it'll be an interesting couple of weeks coming up because that starts on the first of next month.

Civil Certifiers also approves subdivision certificates after DA consent where permission under Council LEP unfortunately the only Council allowing this is Orange City. I guess Orange City is not expecting too much competition.

And the final thing and probably the activity that will probably interest most of you people in the room is to issue strata certificate for registration at the Land Titles Office. I understand that only one certificate has been registered by a private certifier at the LTO to date but there will be from the advice that I'm getting from the clients that I service we look after a lot of unit developers that they are certainly very interested in getting involved in issuing strata certificates by private people.

The Principal certifying authority: Everybody thinks that the accredited certifiers and the principal certifying authority are the same person; that is not the case. An accredited certifier or a PCA he inspects work during construction and issues compliance certificates. Now when we look at that the compliance certificates; depending on which Council you're working in determines the timing and the number of certificates that you have to issue. If you have a consent say from Pittwater Council; on their consents there is an expectation that up to 25 compliance certificates are required. In reality, prior to certification there was possibly only 3, 4 or maybe 5 inspections carried out by Council officers. In our organization; what we do we rely on certification from surveyors we rely on certification from engineers; we rely on certification from pest control people and they are put into Council with a covering letter in that particular Council area. But there is an expectation in that Council that they are issued within 7 days that is the only Council that requires them at that point. We generally attach all our certification with the interim or final occupation certificate.

The interim or final occupation certificate they're two different animals again. The interim occupation certificate is the certificate which is issued where a building is completed and its found to be suitable for occupation. Interestingly under the Act class 1 and class 10 buildings don't require to have any occupation certificates you can just go out there, build them and do what you like. Councils by their conditions have put that back in the game, they're saying they do want occupation certificates so in essence an interim occupation certificate is say where the building is completed but the on site detention might not be installed, landscaping might not be in, retaining walls might not be constructed, or indeed there might even be some conditions of consent issued by the Council that haven't been met. The final occupation certificate however is where everything is done; all the OSD, landscaping all the conditions have been satisfied. There is some conjecture out there particularly at Council level where they're saying that the final occupation certificate does not necessarily mean all the conditions have been met. We at Essential Certifiers do not issue a final occupation certificate unless all the conditions have been met.

Again I reiterate the PCA is not necessarily the accredited certifier who issued the construction certificate. There are some certifiers or accredited certifiers who will only issue construction certificates and won't get involved in the PCA work. The PCA work is actually going out to the site and making sure the job is done properly. The downside of that unfortunately is that there are some people out there who get their construction certificate, they think beauty I don't have to do anything else now, they get on and build their building don't have anybody come down to have a look at the building, they get to the end and then they're looking for certification from someone. Unfortunately it's not forthcoming - certainly not from my organisation.

Council's role. Council has the opportunity to do any of the above certification. However the intensity of competition for the work or the interest varies from Council to Council dependent upon the liability they wish to expose themselves to. Many Council's such as North Sydney have made it clear they're not interested in doing what we do. The way to get themselves out of that they've placed very high costs on their construction certificates and inspection services. As a result of that the people in their particular area I think there's round a 92% takeup in private certification in that area. There's only about 8% left.

Bankstown and Sutherland have set up business units to actively compete. Sydney city also actively compete with in their area and they will compete on price. Rockdale Council are consistently attempting to win business from companies operating in its area by offering reduced DA and CC processing times, I don't know whether that's legal or not but they're doing it. Liverpool and Wyong provide a low cost CC that private certifiers cannot meet in terms of the fees charged. Wyong's are free if you get a DA/CC. If you get a DA and then go to a private certifier for the CC then you'll pay probably $300-400 more.

Some Councils, by stealth, try to stymie the process egg Holroyd & Sutherland Council s require fully worked up landscape and storm water drainage plans with DA submissions contrary to advice from DUAP. Hornsby Council requires a CC to be issued at the cost of $400 from them for the concrete path that services the cross over point on back to back dual occupancies. When we raise those issues with DUAP there seems to be reluctance for them to get involved and do anything about it.

Is certification working? According to local government, no; but in reality its an outstanding success. 60% of all CCs are currently issued by private certifiers in NSW. These figures have been delivered by the Bureau of Statistics. When we first started off Councils were being a bit underhanded they weren't putting through the submissions to the Bureau on what private certifiers were doing. All certifiers now in NSW lodge directly to the Bureau of Statistics so they get a better picture on what's actually happening out there.

What can you expect if you use a certifier? Home owners, builders, land developers and developers can expect to receive the following from a private certifier. Utmost integrity in performing duties, optimum service at all times, consistency of assessment and inspection, and I think when we look at consistency of assessment and inspection, I think that's what the business community wants. They don't want the fact that they might work in 40-50 different Councils and it varies from Council to Council. When they come to our company they get consistency through the organisation. And the final thing, reasonable fees for service.

We talked about complying development earlier and the questions got to be asked is complying development working? In a nutshell, no; and you have to ask why. The policy controls which have been prepared by Councils and submitted to DUAP for approval interfere with the activities of private certifiers and Council itself when they approve these certificates and I'll highlight some areas. When we look at Hastings Shire Council north of NSW they went out and said right we want to capture this business for our Council so they set up their controls so they could actually go in there and actively engage with private certifiers and deliver the outcomes that was expected. They hold 95% of the business still in their area and they are meeting the 7 day turnaround time which is required by the Act. Some of the controls which knock complying development out is land area controls. Look at Penrith for instance. What they've said is it can only be a complying development if the land area is over 450 square metres. When we look at the sub divisions in Penrith most of the allotments of land are under 450 and so therefore they've got to go to Council and get a DA.

Cut and fill controls. Until complying development came in; the cut and field control norm in Sydney was one metre and one metre. In their wisdom the Council said well what we're going to do we're going to make it a 500 cut and fill policy and so therefore if you're going to go over that 500 now when we look at the blocks of land we all work on there's very few with only a metre fall on them so therefore we have to go back to Council for a DA. The most interesting thing with this is that under the DA process there are many, many buildings which have been approved particularly on Greenfield sites with up to 2 metres cut and fill. Clearly when you look down those subdivisions there is really no tangible benefit from getting a DA for that process.

Two storey dwellings; they can only be approved by certifiers in Campbelltown, there is no other Council area where they're allowed because their policies don't permit it.

The final and most interesting one, height restrictions at 2.4 metres where its commonplace for a garage to have 2.6 metre ceiling height just to cater for the garage roller door so therefore if we've got 2.6 in one section of the building it goes back for a DA.

Is there a solution? in short - yes. We've had certain discussions with DUAP and we've made various submissions over probably the past 4.5 months because of the expectation from the Minister that he wanted more but he's getting less and they said well what is your solution.

We put to the government that SEPP 60 which is the policy which would set up for implementation over Council area where they didn't get off their backsides to prepare their own policies and the government said well we're going to develop our own policy and these are going to be the rules we're going to work to.

Now when we look at SEPP 60, SEPP 60 works in Campbelltown. At our organisation we have around about a 50/50 ratio CC complying development to DA in the work that we do. When we look at that its in the order of around 52 dwellings that we've approved without having to get a DA. When we talk about the approval that is 7 days after submission not the normal 35 which we're seeing. Now with the SEPP there is an expectation that it should be really put over the UDP lands, you know neighbour notification is really not an issue, there is an expectation when you go onto these greenfield sites that there will be 1-2 storey dwellings, if its 3 storeys, yes, fine DA, not a problem but I think there would be an expectation that if the industry could get SEPP 60 over the UDP lands then everybody would be much better off and would have a faster turnaround time from the current 35 days to 7 days.

When we look back at the original White Paper and the discussions that the DUAP told the community that was the initial reason for the reform.

The future. The general building and development industry has adopted private certification with the result of certainty of professional assessment of its construction plans. They enjoy that today. This situation will, I believe, increase in the current 60% level of CCs issued by a private certifier to 90% or possibly 100% if complying development controls are amended to provide sufficient scope for realistic outcomes.

Thank you very much.

Barry Yardley

Thank you Bernie. Our third speaker is Tom Jellibrand. Tom is the manager for Business Customers with Sydney Water. He is responsible for servicing the developer and commercial industrial customer segments. Tom operates a tradewaste acceptance service, manages backflow prevention program and negotiates with developers planning to connect to or expand Sydney Water's infrastructure. Tom has extensive experience working in State and local government as well as working with the Urban Development Industry. Tom's presentation will focus on a new business and IT model for managing the urban development process in Sydney Water. Welcome Tom.

Tom Jellibrand - 'The e-Developer initiative'

Thank you Barry. As Barry said I'm going to talk to you today about a new concept that Sydney Water is introducing its called the e-developer principally because if we call it developer nobody would be interested you put a small 'e' in front and everybody is excited.

The actual concept it's a new business model for delivering service and behind it to enable that model to operate is a new IT system. The important reason for saying that is, it's not all about IT.

I'm then going to then talk about a new player in the process, which is a person we're going to be calling a Water Servicing Coordinator. I'll give you a quick overview of the benefits of the new model and the new system then you can ask questions but I think you will have to ask questions when we have the panel at the end.

e-developer. As a system it's a new method for the lodgment, assessment and the management of development work which is the normal urban development work that people need to go through as part of their DA's the sort of thing that Barry was touching sorry Bernie was touching on beforehand. If you've got a DA you'll get conditions of consent, go see Sydney Water section 73 certificate construction building water mains etc etc. So this e-developer concept relates to that.

It's an important step towards a real 'one stop' shop for Sydney Water customers. As I said before, there is an IT component to it and its part of an overall approach in Sydney Water which is a new customer information and billing system which covers pretty much all of our processes, products and services that we offer in customer services.

The e-developer concept is going to provide an automated and standardised process for connections. For probably most of you who have dealt with Sydney Water over the years you may have found a variable level of service, according to what office you went to, Sydney Water is a big organization, it had 11 different offices run by probably about 100 different people and from time to time you got different solutions according to which office you went to, which wasn't always a good thing.

So this system is actually going to be introducing a more standardised approach to management of work. As I mentioned before, there is an IT component and in the future all work with Sydney Water in terms of the urban development work is going to be occurring via electronic links operated by these water servicing coordinators. The coordinators are going to be getting access to Sydney Water via the web.

In terms of how it looks, this is a very high level reasonably conceptual sort of diagram. You've got the customer over here which is the developer or the developer's customer who accesses a person called an agent which we're actually calling the water servicing coordinator and then via the Internet that agent or water servicing coordinator is going to be lodging all the information that Sydney Water requires for processing the application. Let's say it's a Section 73 application, which is satisfying Sydney Water's requirements for connection, which is pretty much a standard condition in all Council consents.

So that comes to Sydney Water via the Internet and then when it comes into Sydney Water it goes to our Sydney Water personnel and it moves around Sydney Water electronically. In the past people had to copy things and send them to different offices to our system guys our water guys our waste water guys, our property guys, all over Sydney which was quite a slow time consuming process, it was manual; relied on faxes, e-mails paper letters all sorts of things very, very slow, that'll all be happening electronically by a thing called 'Work Flow' so that according to the type of application depending on the type of application we receive, it'll actually be automatically routed through the areas that need to look at it and comment on it which is indicated by these cogs here, that's the work flow working. And there is a mechanism in there as well which allows for the automatic billing back to that water servicing coordinator. I think that's the salient features of the model.

The e-developer concept is, I know you've heard this probably a thousand times, but for Sydney Water its probably one of the most demonstrable realistic first steps to providing a 'one stop' shop for our customers. So that in the past and currently today customers actually have to go to the Council, they get their consent, the Council tells them to see Sydney Water, Sydney Water plays with them for a little while and gives them a 'Notice of Requirements' saying 'no you have to go and talk to somebody else', then they talk to somebody else who then comes back to talk to Sydney Water and then we talk to that person again and then they often go back to the customer and say crikey this is going to involve a whole lot of work do you want to build a whole lot of pipes and the customer says 'yes, yes I still want to go ahead', so that person then comes back to Sydney Water and then there's a whole lot of work that happens and as that work's occurring there's lots of talks between Sydney Water and this person and quite often the customer gets involved and at the end of sometimes quite a lengthy process, the customer gets what they want which is usually a little bit of paper which says it's a Section 73 certificate. So what's happening in that situation is the customer, and the customers consultants, are getting bounced quite a lot around different organisations and different people inside Sydney Water.

This approach is one way of shortening it and we're saying to the customer instead of coming to see us just go straight away to this person that we're calling a Water Servicing Coordinator and they'll take you all the way through the process, and they can do it from their garage they can do it from their office, from potentially your living room because its all going to be electronic, we actually don't want to see them, we don't want them to come to our counter, they don't need to come to our counter, and most of them don't actually want to themselves.

The Water Servicing Coordinator will be the person responsible for doing the lodgment of all the information for Sydney Water and negotiating the assessment with Sydney Water but they're also going to be the person responsible for managing the works that Sydney Water requires and they're also going to be responsible for recording minor works activities and also handling applications for technical services, I don't want to get involved with too many of the ins and outs of different Sydney Water products and services but the Water Servicing Coordinators will be handling pretty much all of the applications that you can make under the umbrella of urban development. So it's probably opportune that I talk a little bit more about water servicing coordinators.

In terms of the selection of these water servicing coordinators we're going to select them from our existing pool of project managers and I'm assuming a certain level of knowledge here. We've got an existing list of project managers and they've been accredited, for want of a better word, with us at the moment and they're able to actually build infrastructure on behalf of customers. That's the group of people we'll be going to and saying which of you people would like to be water servicing coordinators.

So the minimum requirements for a water servicing coordinator is that you have to be a project manager but there is also going to be some additional requirements and they will include such things as volume of work we want water servicing coordinators that actually have a stream of work, we don't want project managers to only do one job a year we want the ones that do hundreds maybe not that many. We're going to look at the geographical location of the Water Servicing Coordinators because we want to make sure that there is a reasonable spread across the Sydney area. The coordinators are going to need to be able to demonstrate a certain level of customer service and either going to the customers location or having a place within their office that customers can go to. They need to successfully complete training, they need to have a certain base level of hardware, which I think most of them would have anyway. The arrangements that we're going to be having with the Water Service Coordinators is actually going to be a formal contract which is pretty important because it will enable both parties to actually introduce a bit of rigor into the relationship so that we can get some really good quality work happening in terms of the assets at the end of the process as well as the customers throughout the process.

So I've just started touching on some of the key benefits of the change. In terms of the applicant, we think that the applicant or the customer will see reduced turnaround times specifically because they're going to a person up front that can take them through the whole process and that when the work actually comes in to Sydney Water instead of us manually handling it as we have done in the past, it'll be electronically moving around the organisation. As I said it's a more convenient 'one stop' shop solution. In terms of the Water Service Coordinators, we think there is an opportunity for them in terms of increased business. They will be able to provide a more complete service to their customers they would be having direct electronic access to some of Sydney Water's information systems. I'm talking specifically about our geographical information 'Hydra'. They will be able to monitor the progress of their works so they actually just go into the web, the customer rings up says where the hell is it up to, they just log in, look up the case number and it'll tell them exactly what steps they're up to and if they're not happy with that well they make enquiries about how to speed it up or what the problem is. As I said before the big benefit to the coordinator as well as to all the customers is that we're introducing standardised process. It'll be actually set by an IT system in terms of the different steps that have to happen.

Other benefits to Sydney Water. We're more able to direct our expertise to where its needed which is the technical assessment of applications; not the photocopying of paper, of referral across the organisation, the telephone calls the faxing, we can actually focus our expertise onto the actual application and the technical requirements that we want to put on to it. We'll then be able to provide more support to the customer as well as the Water Servicing Coordinator and at the end of the day we're going to get much better assets, records and supply management.

The one benefit that isn't up there is the benefit to everybody and I'm not sure if Des Mooney talked about it this morning or Warwick Watkins will talk about it later on, but the big benefit to everyone with this system is that we're introducing a system that is actually going to make electronic information about Sydney Water processes applications and information electronically available to a variety of people. It'll be sitting at a place that people can go to. We think it's a very important step towards people like surveyors project managers developers actually creating the information once having it available electronically and then being able to share it and look at it.

One of the key benefits of having access to Sydney Waters geographical information system is that if you can get access to the system by being a water servicing coordinator you'll also be able to look around in the area to identify any other forms of activity for commercial reasons you won't be able to interrogate the specifics of the application but you'd be able to identify them as activity as occurring and you'll also be able to identify who is managing that job. It could be somebody you know or you could ring them up and say 'what are you doing' and there could be a synergy between the two projects so there are some opportunities for sharing a lot of information.

And that's my speedy presentation, I'm happy to answer questions after the next speaker. Thanks.


Barry Yardley

Thank you Tom. Our next speaker is Ralph Miller. Ralph is a developer, Policy & Process Manager at Sydney Water with responsibility for ensuring that Sydney Water's policies and procedures are clear, equitable and consistently applied. Ralph spent over 20 years in the Urban Development area of Sydney Water assisting in facilitating the expansion of services to meet Sydney's growing needs. Ralph's presentation will focus on the servicing requirements for small lot developments and the urban development policy review process. Thank you Ralph.


Ralph Miller

Thank you Barry. I think I've drawn the short straw; afternoon tea awaits you. In addressing my topic I'm going to make it fairly brief. I'm going to address some initiatives being undertaken by Sydney Water and you may have already picked up on a number of these already. These will clarify and hopefully make it a bit easier for setting requirements and meeting requirements of both small and large scale developments.

In recent years great efforts have been made in the public sector to not only become more efficient and effective but also to deliver a better standard of service. I might add there that a better standard of service doesn't necessarily always mean cheaper. But it does mean being consistent in how policies and procedures are applied to those in the community who have to deal with public bodies such as Sydney Water. We want to be not only consistent in application, but fair and equitable.

This is perhaps best demonstrated in our efforts that Sydney Water has made to work with the suppliers of water and sewerage infrastructure. Historically the '80s and '90s saw that design and construction work passed out to the private sector to compliment this move there has been a move to the national codes and the Sydney Water supplements, the design and construction of these works. These codes will be refined over time the national codes will expand, supplements will shrink. I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that as there is greater clarity in the codes it'll take out some of the second guessing as to what Sydney Water's requirements actually are and makes servicing developments easier.

At the same time quite a few of you would be aware that we've had an initiative in setting up a water infrastructure industry quality council where we've had representatives from the project managers soon to be the Water Servicing Coordinators that Tom has mentioned from designers, testers and constructors. I suppose its true to say that in that forum the discussions have at times been lively, at times very satisfying as matters have progressed and at times somewhat frustrating, but I suppose at all times its been fairly slow and steady progress and industries making an input into the processes and procedures within Sydney Water. At the same time our work manuals have been greatly expanded and refined and we're making them much clearer. Those work manuals there are instructions to suppliers, they are much more comprehensive documents than they were a few years ago so there is a great deal of clarity coming into what Sydney wants for the servicing of development.

I'll cut this down a little bit but Tom has already painted you a comprehensive picture of our e-developer initiatives. One of these initiatives will help clarify Sydney Water's requirements on the small scale and indeed the large scale developments my topic today. As Tom has indicated work will flow through that electronic process and as the Sydney Water developer activities, and I was the person that manages the process on our side and the Water Servicing Coordinator pushes work through that process, both individuals will be able to represent access certain relevant documents and these documents will be the process manuals that I've mentioned and perhaps more importantly given my topic today, the relevant policies and guidelines.

I quickly mentioned a few of these, I'm not going to try and solve any problems of specific individual developments here today but give you some of the overriding things. Developer charges, and a number of you out there in the audience will probably roll their eyes at this particular stage, it's a huge cost on developers. We have produced a set of guidelines actually as to how developer charges are created, those guidelines will be posted on the Sydney Water Website and it will be possible for a coordinator after a little homework to quickly work out rule of thumb charges for most types of developments - quickly and accurately. Indeed we're looking at a link with our geographical data base and a calculator sitting behind that which will make the calculations even easier still. It's available right now internally, in fact it'll be posted on the updated version will be posted on our internal web ready for Monday, and supplier and general public access is being finalised now.

Moving on very quickly, we do allow in some circumstances the bonding of works. That document is finalised and that will be available in the public arena. How we recover the cost of existing works after having a policy in place since the early '60s and where developers benefit from existing works are charged certain charges, we've actually written that up, formalised it and that's going to be in the public arena.

The dealing for your servicing requirements for dual occupancy and other two dwelling development there is a policy document that just recently been revised and that will make the requirements clearer. One example for unsubdivided dual occupancy, Sydney Water will allow a single point of connection to its water main, with one 20 millimetre water meter or you may have a T and two meters and a single point of connection to your sewer main. With the water service as a T and two meters, you might have got an argument with some of the Sydney Water officers whether that would have been permitted in recent months; not from now on we've clarified it, having a T and 2 meters allows a landlord tenant relationship on an unsubdivided dual occupancy to apportion usage charges under the Residential Tenancies Act. So we're trying to put things clearer and make them a little bit easier for the public.

I'll probably finish up on this particular one. Tom, as his homework at the moment, has a document that I prepared on connections and it's a fairly comprehensive document and it actually covers our connection requirements it picks up from those very, very broad general requirements covered by the National Codes and the Sydney Water supplements. It looks at the funding requirements who pays what, which pockets the dollars come out for the various types of work whether they're minimum size or upsized works. It looks at the different property and development types and your specific connection requirements so if you're doing Strata Title or Stratum mixed development if you've got a residue lot and more, it specifies what our requirements are for those particular types of property development. And finally, it touches on a whole range, not touches, it comprehensively covers the circumstances that may affect connection requirements including those sub divisions which are sometimes a little bit tricky, the subdivisions where you don't have a direct frontage, the subdivisions where the existing sewer is in a roadway and its been a fairly intensive debate within Sydney Water as to what our requirements would be on that, subdivision creating encroaching lines and subdivisions where you've got that access or right of way in creating a number of lots down a fairly skinny right of way or right of carriageway.

That we hope to have approved within a few weeks. That also will be available on the net and I could run through a few other policies here and I've actually got some specific examples about some of the things and over afternoon tea I'm happy to discuss some of these with you on a one to one basis.

In conclusion, whilst I haven't specifically addressed some of the specific issues, what I've tried to do is demonstrate that Sydney Water is attempting to put a whole lot of its processes and procedures in quite some detail in the public forum so that you can access those documents and particularly individuals like Water Service Coordinators where it will be really their bread and butter to access those documents and know them backwards and therefore once you know our requirements its going to make the understanding of what our requirements are and meeting them a hell of a lot easier.

So that's the task that we've set and I think you'll agree that there's a lot of information going in the public arena that in the past quite frankly Sydney Water offices held them very closely to their chest. Thank you very much.

Barry Yardley

Thank you Ralph. We've got a few minutes for some questions.


Gordon Wren

Bernie, Gordon Wren here, mate how are you. Could I make a few comments you mentioned about the accreditation schemes on the engineers and planners, you forgot the poor old surveyors. The PSOA have accredited civil guys, two of those and two strata guys another 4-5 in the pipeline so look out, don't just use the engineers, mate, because surveyors are good too. And I think Steve Johnson would agree that the Strata Certificates when you're running about 20 I think its about 20 registered at this point in time so don't forget that either.


Barry Yardley

Any more questions, okay Greg.


Greg Oxley

This is a question to Tom. The e-developer process Tom. Is local government aware of the format of the electronic lodgement that's required. I understand that the development consent has to be either in a PDF or Word.txt format and the accompanying plan needs to be in AutoCad dwg format, would it not be better to have the plan in a .tif type format because I understand from talking to some people in local government that there is still a significant level of plans that are presented to local government that are not prepared by external consultants that are pretty roughly drawn and it might be better to look at the autocad type lodgment at a later date in the process.

Tom Jellibrand

Thanks Greg, in terms of local government consents unfortunately they vary from sometimes one page to hundreds of pages and there is no consistency within local government in terms of how the document is produced, some people do them in word files, some of them are actually produced via mainframe systems and they're all embedded so deeply in that that you can't transfer that consent in an electronic form easily. So we've been looking at scanning in consents at the beginning and those consents would be communicated to Sydney Water electronically via the web as well. The problem with that is that when you scan large documents it takes time, they're huge and it's very difficult to manage. So we're actually still investigating how we're going to get the Council consent into a form that can be communicated that the Water Servicing Coordinator can communicate it to us and that's a matter of watching this space, it might be that we'll only be looking at a part of the consent. We've actually been talking to Councils about their preparedness to give us the consents in a nice easy word form and they're either not interested or they can't do it. In terms of the actual plan generation, your observation is correct, the quality of plans given to local government range from at worst, on the back of an envelope all the way through to professionally prepared survey accurate plans using Autocad. And that's a real problem that variation. That's why I think, without blowing the trumpet too loudly, the initiative by Sydney Water is actually going to introduce some rigor into the system because ultimately those plans will have to be survey accurate and they're going to have to be prepared according to our needs and hopefully because most of those plans will ultimately be with Sydney Water we can dictate how they're prepared at the beginning so the customers will realise they will need proper plans drawn up especially for subdivision so they go straight to that place at the beginning of the process. It's prepared once and its then available for a variety of people to use, it'll come through to Sydney Water as part of the application and if that subdivision doesn't change in any way that will actually be the plan that's registered LPI. So we're talking closely with LPI about how we can share information how we can give each other information early on in the process it'll help with registration as well as assessment. You asked the question as well the software we were going to use to do the actual plan work, the way the system works is the Water Servicing Coordinator will actually access our geographical information system via the web and grab the piece of the cadastre that the customer or servicing coordinator is interested in and that will be in a form that can be used by a variety of software systems so it can be populated by Autocad or other software to do the drawing. In terms of the actual hydraulic design that can only be submitted to us in Autocad in the latest version.

Barry Yardley

Okay time for one more question.


Martin Burke, Lovegrove Oxley

Tom, thank you mate. Did you say that Water Servicing Coordinators would be the only point of contact in relation to technical services.


Tom Jellibrand

My charter for my presentation was to be quick so I cut a few sort of important details out. We're going to get the Water Servicing Coordinators, they're going to be selected initially from our group of Project Managers and that arrangement might last for about a year or more then we're going to open it up and we're actually going to say well who wants to do this role of Water Servicing Coordinator and it opens up that role to people like Bernie and other companies like that so the certifiers could start considering expanding their role and that's when you really get the 'one stop' shop. I talked about taking a step towards a 'one stop' shop I think if certifiers were to do the work that I'm foreshadowing well then truly the customer only needs to go to one place.

The actual role of a Water Servicing Coordinator, its mainly in that section 73 area but they will be able to lodge all applications that Sydney Water Urban Development currently gets but on day one customers will still be able to go to a Sydney Water counter if they choose and say Council says I need a certificate or I need to get this technical service, I want to deal with you Sydney Water because there is still a mistrust out there especially Mums and Dads and people of non-English speaking backgrounds they'd rather go with government than perhaps a private body. So on day one, customers will still be able to go to a Sydney Water counter and we'll have the means in place to accept their application over the counter and get it rolling, but that's a really wasteful exercise because once we've told them what our requirements are they'll actually have to go back to Water Servicing Coordinator anyway if it involves some form of construction. But the push once the system has been rolled out is to migrate as many customers to Water Servicing Coordinators as possible. So the target I've set for our business is to have 100% of customers going to Water Servicing Coordinators after 12 months of the system going live. Thanks mate.



Barry Yardley

Okay, thank you. We've been fortunate in having good quality presenters delivering important and relevant information. We live in a dynamic environment and where we have many challenges and hosts of solutions and our four presenters here for this session they are surely people who can help us with solutions to these challenges. I imagine for a few minutes prior to them having their coffee they don't mind having a one to one down the front here, be quick. So if we'd like to break for a coffee break outside, thank you

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