Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Dec 05, 2019 11:14 am I am hoping someone can help me to shed some light on this and hopefully we can get over what seems to be the final hurdle for our DA. We submitted our DA some months ago and one of the objections that the council raised in relation to our DA was that the builder hadn’t included plans to reseal the driveway. Our builder don’t do long driveways so we knew we would need to arrange this later through another contractor, but no one told us we would need to submit the plans now. Council suggested we re-use the plans that were approved for the neighbour who sold us the land and simply adapt these plans to suit our house & garage. Our neighbour agreed to let us have his plans which were put together by a Consulting Engineer. This seemed like a simple solution until we hit an issue with inconsistent levels between the old driveway plans drawn by the engineer and builder’s newer house plans. This stems from a recalibration of the starting point for the two different surveys used by the engineer who drew the original driveway plan and the newer survey used by the builder for the house plans. Both surveys start from the same reference point in the NSW SCIMS (Survey Control Information Management System). The driveway plans used a survey drawn in June 2013 which showed this reference point at a height of 160. The SCIMS database was updated in April 2017 and that reference point was recalibrated at the more precise height of 158.855. The net effect of this is that every point on the old 2013 survey appears to be about 1145 mm higher than the heights shown on the new survey. This sounds like a pretty simple issue to us, but both the council and the engineers are being very difficult. The council are demanding that we submit plans (by Monday) that have consistent levels. Ironically, they don’t seem to mind whether they are consistently right or consistently wrong, but they insist they have to be consistent. Trying to pretend that the old survey is accurate doesn’t sound sensible to us, so we need to get a new driveway plan with levels that match the house plans. The engineers claim that this will take weeks and cost $ thousands to do. The council tell us our DA process will lapse on Monday and we will need to withdraw it and start again if we don’t submit consistent plans by then. My question is, I sort of understand why the council wanted the redraw of the whole driveway before we realised there was an error in the survey (on paper, the house sits a lot lower than the shared driveway). Now that we realised the error, and in reality, the level difference between the house and the shared driveway is a very gentle one, do we still need to redraw the whole driveway? If we can just redraw the bit that connects the shared driveway to the garage, we might be able to meet the council deadline and save ourselves some $$$. Even more upsetting than the extra $$$, is the fact that there is no way we can meet the deadline if we need to redraw the whole driveway. The council told me we need to withdraw and reapply when the driveway is ready. This will put us behind even further. We submitted our initial DA in June so it's already six months in the making. We are being penalised for an error (I don't even know if it can be called an error, it is a recalibration of data by a third party) which we didn't know until recently and we have a surveyor's statement to indicate where the inconsistency is. The council's dogmatic view on this is going to cost us time and money. Have you encountered this before? Any ideas on what to do now? The deadline is Monday Dec9. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Re: Last hurdle to DA approval - driveway submission to Ku R 2Dec 05, 2019 8:23 pm Councils. I feel your pain about consistency. Every one will be different unfortunately but I didn’t think DA’s expired? For my planning app I just needed to show where the driveway was, but I then needed an engineers drawing for the building permit. Sounds like the council just want a drawing of the driveway, as you say, right or wrong. I would copy the layout of the old one and make the levels the same. Just remove the engineers name and details etc. Hi Minho I have heaps of experience in Ku-ring-gai with both DAs and CDC ( this is the main area we build in). DA's are taking 12-18months and CDC's we have been doing… 1 3162 1 2989 To my understanding early saw cuts are to control shrinkage cracks, so doing them now would be pointless. Control joints may reduce ugly cracking during periods of soil… 3 9862 |