By Sue Newman  February 4, 2012

To cope with an anticipated increase in building consent work, the Ashburton District Council is boosting its number of building officials.

Over the past few months the council’s building officials have struggled to keep pace with the amount of work crossing their desks, from consent issuing to building inspections.
The council has a 20 day statutory time frame on processing consents, but at times this has not been achieved. And builders, wanting site inspections have also been hampered by having to wait several days for inspections to be carried out.
Building services manager Mark Fields said he is now planning to increase the number of officials from six to eight to cope with the anticipated increase in work in the coming months.
“We’ve had to bring contractors in so we could get caught up with our backlog, but we’ll shortly get to the stage where we can do the job in  good time frame.”
Some building firms were booking inspections up to two weeks in advance to ensure they were completed when required, but Mr Field said once a full complement of staff is in place, the wait for an inspection should only be two or three days.
While the building department was under pressure for most of last year, December saw a slow down in consent applications. Numbers tumbled from 59 in December 2010 to 43 last December.
Consent values also dropped, from $6.290 million to $5.618 million for the month.
While the number of new house builds was static on 10, those constructed in December 2010 had a much higher total value at $3.278m, compared to $2.5million in December last year.
There were 1049 consents issued in 2011 and 1062 in 2011. Last year’s consents, however were worth $93.274 million while the previous year’s building work was valued at $86.792 million.
Last year 146 new homes were built and 32 milking sheds;  in 2010 there were 160 new home builds and 20 milking shed constructions. There were 132 new farm buildings, haybarns and implement sheds built last year and 307 the previous year