Tuesday, 26 August 2008

How much does it cost to APPLY to install a frost fan?

OK, so a bit of ringing around and I have begin to get an idea of the costs for building consents for frost fan installations.
First you will to pay for a Project Information Memorandum (PIM). This will be about $300. Then you will need to pay for the building consent itself (that would be another $300). Then there is a $3000 bond that will be used if there is the slighted hint of an objection to your proposed installation (and who wouldn’t want to have a frost fan put up next to them?)
Finally, because the process is so convoluted and deliberately obscure you will probably need to hire a resource management consultant. This will be a flat starting fee of about $1500 and the amount will only increase as their work increases (if you call shuffling paper work).

Now, this all started because it might have been an interesting exercise to try and calculate the amount that the Council have gathered as a result of the consent process for frost fans. But in all honesty, it will be difficult to tell since in theory you will be saving money if you are installing more of them.
I.e. you should only need one PIM and building consent for installing two frost fans (so long as there is nothing difficult about the installation (built on a flood plain, unstable ground, that sort of thing).

So for instance for the four frost fans that are intended to be installed opposite the Burleigh dairy (resource consent application U080033). I would anticipate that there will be an easy $600 in PIM and building consent and the $3000 bond will have evaporated pretty quickly because of the objections that should have been laid by the residents of the 70 odd houses that are within 500 metres of the installation.
They may have saved money on the resource consent consultant, because their application was truly one of the worst I have ever seen (if you used a consultant for that, they need to be fired).

However when you put the cost of the process alongside the cost of the machines (approximately $50,000 each) then I suppose who could begrudge the Council and the resource consultants (and probably the lawyers in the case of U080033) getting their fingers into the pot?

A nice little earner since there are 747 frost fans installed. I suppose we won’t need to have a rates rise if we install a few more?

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