Bite sized blog: Activity status

Welcome to our bite sized blog series about recent changes to the RMA and what they mean for Regular People. This is a very short vocabulary post, with a Bonus Activity Status Diagram to print out and stick on your fridge (using that magnet you got from a street market in Wellington that says "It's martini o'clock!" even though I don't need reminding).

​The Resource Legislation Amendment Act 2017 (RLAA) was adopted by the New Zealand government in April 2017. It contains changes to 5 different Acts, one of which is the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA). Some of the changes to the RMA happened immediately, and others will go live in October 2017.

Next week's bite sized RMA blog post is about resource consent applications and how councils decide to notify them. ​So today we'll chat about what an activity status is, and how public notification of resource consents is changing.

​Resource consents can be:

• publicly notified (everyone gets a chance to give feedback)
• limited notified (directly affected people get to give feedback), or
• non-notified (public feedback isn’t sought)

District and regional plans explain the impact an activity might have on the community by assigning it an “activity status”. The status of an activity can be permitted, controlled, restricted discretionary, discretionary, non-complying, or prohibited. Those words sit on a continuum and describe how the council can “treat” the activities when they are assessing your resource consent, and when deciding how the consent will be notified (or not).

We’ll refer to these concepts in our next post, so save the fancy diagram somewhere, bookmark this post, or grab a copy here ... and pass the olives. 

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Author

Jen Olson is a technical communicator who likes to interpret technical stuff for regular people. 
Deb Kissick helped with the definitions.​