Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 3Dec 16, 2020 10:59 am worldofmud Hi, Momomomo council's requirement for them to get an easement through the rear neighbour's land. Likely because for whatever reason, other options are unsuitable. What's wrong with the existing drainage system-does it just discharge onto the ground and are you on the low side of the road or something? Momomomo If we were to build a new house that could comply with CDC requirements, would we be able to bypass the local council's stormwater policy? If the development qualifies for a CDC it generally means it is compliant with the local policy so it not really about sidestepping. See Page 2: https://www.georgesriver.nsw.gov.au/getmedia/0afdf43b-79e3-481b-a71f-e8014fa61ec6/Complying-Development-Application-Checklist.aspx and Page 10: https://www.georgesriver.nsw.gov.au/getmedia/339464df-b0a1-4a87-a6bc-69adeecd6513/Complying-Development-Certificate-Application.aspx Momomomo We have heard from friends who built in the same area that the local council generally woundl't approve for alternative on-site discharge system Each site and council is different but if discharge to the council system is reduced via suitable on-site disposal, reuse or detention system they generally look on it favourably-why wouldn't they? Momomomo easement is pretty much the only way if we want to redevelop. What other possible solutions have you explored and why were they rejected? If you have not fully explored the options additional info (which DCP applies/suburb, existing site drainage, and topography) would probably result in more useful responses. Cheers Thank you very much for the detailed response! I guess this is a question too hard to tell at this early stage. Will have to wait for the stormwater management plan to be completed by a hydraulic engineer and worst case need to wait for the council's decision on this. Everything depend on what we wanna build and our site specifications. Anyway, much appreciated for the links! Those are very useful. And yes we are building in Georges River council area. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 4Dec 16, 2020 8:02 pm We're also building in Georges River council area, stormwater design was a bit of a headache but not insurmountable. Our DA was approved in December 2019 so our stormwater design was assessed to the old Kogarah council requirements (post merger, council was using both of the existing Hurstville and Kogarah council requirements depending on where the property was located). However I see that council have recently published a new stormwater management policy covering all areas... https://www.georgesriver.nsw.gov.au/StG ... y-2020.pdf Can't speak for other council areas, but for Georges River it doesn't matter whether you're CDC or council DA, both have to comply with the same council stormwater management policy. Regarding an easement through a neighbours land, I can't see that anything in the stormwater management policy says that's required or even preferred. In any case, council can not insist on it and even if they were were stupid enough to do so, all you have to do is get a letter from the neighbour stating that they refuse to allow it.... and then your hydraulics engineer can move on to an alternative design. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 6Dec 24, 2020 8:32 pm Stewie D As long as your hydraulics engineer is aware of what the council will allow. Some like ours blankly refuse to allow pump-out systems. Stewie Yes, I wouldn't want a pump-out system myself, and in any case, the council area that we and the OP are in strongly discourages them, the words in the old policy said something like.. a pumped system will only be considered after all other systems have been demonstrated to be impractical. Our council area is an older established area (the house we're currently living in is almost 100 years old) and the stormwater infrastructure is quite lacking. The older established houses generally have no documented LPOD and at best have the stormwater discharging to the street kerb, and at worst just have the downpipes discharging to the ground and the water flows overland through neighbours properties. We've tried previously to obtain easements for stormwater on neighbours properties, for our old property and the new one. In both cases we were unsuccessful despite being on good terms with the neighbours. I don't blame them, I would likely decline a request for an easement on our property, particularly if a practical alternative solution existed. From my observation, most people doing a new build in our area are able to satisfy council by having the roof water drain to the street kerb via a rainwater tank with a small absorption trench to deal with capturing surface flows, and that's what's been approved for our new build. A copy of the plans are here viewtopic.php?p=1877956#p1877956 Of course, if you're on a steep block on the low side of the street that approach might not be practical, but it seems to work out for most people around here. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 7Jan 08, 2021 6:48 pm robw17 We're also building in Georges River council area, stormwater design was a bit of a headache but not insurmountable. Our DA was approved in December 2019 so our stormwater design was assessed to the old Kogarah council requirements (post merger, council was using both of the existing Hurstville and Kogarah council requirements depending on where the property was located). However I see that council have recently published a new stormwater management policy covering all areas... https://www.georgesriver.nsw.gov.au/StG ... y-2020.pdf Can't speak for other council areas, but for Georges River it doesn't matter whether you're CDC or council DA, both have to comply with the same council stormwater management policy. Regarding an easement through a neighbours land, I can't see that anything in the stormwater management policy says that's required or even preferred. In any case, council can not insist on it and even if they were were stupid enough to do so, all you have to do is get a letter from the neighbour stating that they refuse to allow it.... and then your hydraulics engineer can move on to an alternative design. Thanks a lot for your reply! Sorry I was busy during Christmas Holiday period and only have revisited this post today. I had a thorough read of the new stormwater discharge policy as well, indeed it outlines a few options not only the easement solution. Hopefully we could come up with a satisfactory storm water discharge design to get council's approval later down the track. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 8Jan 12, 2021 2:19 pm Civil Engineer here, and I live in Beverly Hills (under GRC). GRC allows for charged systems for single dwelling builds, depending on if its possible. The other DA in the street might be for a dual occupancy, or, a charged system was not possible because: 1. Not enough head (block would have to have a serious gradient) 2. Not enough fall from boundary to kerb (this is required to be at 1% fall) 3. Combination of multi-dwelling (dual occ?) and falling away from the street 4. FL issue on a sloping block. To my estimation, you will most likely have an easy time with stormwater - so long as you are able to have your Garage RL/FL to be ABOVE your boundary RL, so its worth having your architect consult a Hydraulic Engineer to ensure this is possible, and to keep this as simple and as cheap as possible. Inbox me if you have any questions/require more info. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 9Mar 25, 2021 10:44 am Hi, it's momomomo here, somehow I cannot log in to my old account and I had to create a new one. Back to this topic: We have received notice from our builder/ hydraulic engineer that they could not achieve gravity fall across the footpath/ nature strip. The hydraulic engineer says that he talked to the person in charge of this issue at Georges River Council and it seems like easement is the only way. I sort of expected that because the property near us faced the same problem and they were building a single dwelling house similar to ours (approx. 520 sqm land, 35 sq double storey house). Anyway, guess we will have to talk to neighbour about it and prepare to pay a large sum of $$ to get an easement. Otherwise the council is not going to approve us for redeveloping the 70 yrs old fibre house on this site. Has anyone had similar experience before? How do you approach your neighbour and what happens if they refuse? Another post in this forum said that Georges River council woudn't take any alternative design even if the neighbour refuses the easement proposal. I have heard that people go to court for this. I really hope we won't go that far, afterall we gotta live next door to each other for years to come. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 10Mar 26, 2021 9:32 am [quote="Monica Z"]Hi, it's momomomo here, somehow I cannot log in to my old account and I had to create a new one. Back to this topic: We have received notice from our builder/ hydraulic engineer that they could not achieve gravity fall across the footpath/ nature strip. The hydraulic engineer says that he talked to the person in charge of this issue at Georges River Council and it seems like easement is the only way. I sort of expected that because the property near us faced the same problem and they were building a single dwelling house similar to ours (approx. 520 sqm land, 35 sq double storey house). Anyway, guess we will have to talk to neighbour about it and prepare to pay a large sum of $$ to get an easement. Otherwise the council is not going to approve us for redeveloping the 70 yrs old fibre house on this site. Has anyone had similar experience before? How do you approach your neighbour and what happens if they refuse? Another post in this forum said that Georges River council woudn't take any alternative design even if the neighbour refuses the easement proposal. I have heard that people go to court for this. I really hope we won't go that far, afterall we gotta live next door to each other for years to come. /quote] Monicaz How did you go with the charged system option? We are doing a duplex down there and have gotten a charged system approved as per the post from the Hydraulic engineer above. If they have rejected this solution did they give a reason? curious to know thanks Simeon Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 11Mar 26, 2021 12:53 pm SejaeD Monicaz How did you go with the charged system option? We are doing a duplex down there and have gotten a charged system approved as per the post from the Hydraulic engineer above. If they have rejected this solution did they give a reason? curious to know thanks Simeon Hi Simeon, Thanks for sharing the info! Our neighbour proposed a charged system and got rejected by the council. According to our hydraulic engineer: "No. XX has an engineering plan which shows a charged line but council conditioned the approval on obtaining an easement and providing a new gravity drainage design". Our builder suggests us to speak to our rear neighbours about easement first. If they refuse, we will then try to submit alternative design for council approval. But chances are the council will insist on us getting an easement even it would mean taking our neighbour to the court. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 12Mar 26, 2021 2:01 pm Monica Z SejaeD Monicaz How did you go with the charged system option? We are doing a duplex down there and have gotten a charged system approved as per the post from the Hydraulic engineer above. If they have rejected this solution did they give a reason? curious to know thanks Simeon Hi Simeon, Thanks for sharing the info! Our neighbour proposed a charged system and got rejected by the council. According to our hydraulic engineer: "No. XX has an engineering plan which shows a charged line but council conditioned the approval on obtaining an easement and providing a new gravity drainage design". Our builder suggests us to speak to our rear neighbours about easement first. If they refuse, we will then try to submit alternative design for council approval. But chances are the council will insist on us getting an easement even it would mean taking our neighbour to the court. Monica Z I must have misread your earlier posts as I thought you said you were going CDC. I could be totally wrong on this and I am going to ask my hydraulic engineer ( will report back next week) but I thought that provided council's policy didn't prohibit something then the engineer had some latitude with design ( with CDC). I know with a DA council's engineers have final say though. Again I may be completely wrong, not an expert but I will ask one as this is an interesting issue. Also, You're not using a builder with the company starting with H are you? just curious as I had a friend who experience similar issues but with a different council. Simeon Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 13Mar 26, 2021 2:12 pm SejaeD Monica Z SejaeD Monicaz How did you go with the charged system option? We are doing a duplex down there and have gotten a charged system approved as per the post from the Hydraulic engineer above. If they have rejected this solution did they give a reason? curious to know thanks Simeon Hi Simeon, Thanks for sharing the info! Our neighbour proposed a charged system and got rejected by the council. According to our hydraulic engineer: "No. XX has an engineering plan which shows a charged line but council conditioned the approval on obtaining an easement and providing a new gravity drainage design". Our builder suggests us to speak to our rear neighbours about easement first. If they refuse, we will then try to submit alternative design for council approval. But chances are the council will insist on us getting an easement even it would mean taking our neighbour to the court. Monica Z I must have misread your earlier posts as I thought you said you were going CDC. My bad Simeon Hi Simeon, Yea we are planning to go through CDC. However from my understanding the council still has the final say regarding stormwater discharge issue. I thought by going CDC we could somehow bypass GRC, but turns out we still have to get their approval for this. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 14Apr 10, 2021 1:31 pm Monica As promised I finally got an answer on your stormwater system from my Hydraulic engineer. I will send you a PM to explain how CDC engineering works. From what you have said in your messages I think your builder isn't going about this in the correct fashion Cheers Simeon Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 15Apr 11, 2021 7:43 am SejaeD Monica As promised I finally got an answer on your stormwater system from my Hydraulic engineer. I will send you a PM to explain how CDC engineering works. From what you have said in your messages I think your builder isn't going about this in the correct fashion Cheers Simeon Hi Monica and Simeon, I'm also in the GRC and facing the same issue, council is adamant on easement only and of course neighbour is outright refusing. May I know what was the outcome? Do we have any chance of building, seems ridiculous that they're forcing us on to get an easement and there isn't any other solutions. Thanks, Jacthan Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 16Apr 11, 2021 10:39 am Out of curiosity I had a good read through the new GRC stormwater policy and it looks much tougher than the old policy in most respects. Our stormwater system (approved December 2019 to the old policy) would not have complied. The new policy has less options for low level properties and does seem to prefer easements for a solution, which will be quite a headache for many people and could easily add $100K to the cost of building. For us it was even a bit of a problem complying with the old policy, or I should say councils interpretation of it... with hindsight I can now see they were imposing some of the requirements of the new policy on us. Contrary to CDC, one of the few good things about the council approval process (maybe the only good thing?) is the possibility of discretion from council. For our stormwater system, council wanted us to limit our LPOD position to within the property street frontage and also wanted a 1% fall for the pipes from the rainwater tank to the LPOD. Both of these could not be achieved simultaneously, and nor were they required by the old policy (but are required by the new one). In the end, we relocated the rainwater tanks to another location to get additional fall and council accepted a 0.5% fall for the pipes from the rainwater tank to the LPOD... but only after a fairly robust argument. My 2c... Work with your hydraulic engineer to come up with a practical solution that's as close to the policy requirements as possible and request council to consider it. Also, get your neighbour to formally decline the easement using the form letter at the end of the new stormwater policy document to demonstrate to council that you tried. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 17Apr 12, 2021 5:28 am Jacthan SejaeD Monica As promised I finally got an answer on your stormwater system from my Hydraulic engineer. I will send you a PM to explain how CDC engineering works. From what you have said in your messages I think your builder isn't going about this in the correct fashion Cheers Simeon Hi Monica and Simeon, I'm also in the GRC and facing the same issue, council is adamant on easement only and of course neighbour is outright refusing. May I know what was the outcome? Do we have any chance of building, seems ridiculous that they're forcing us on to get an easement and there isn't any other solutions. Thanks, Jacthan Jacthan Apologies in advance for the length of this post but it is a very complex issue. Rob wrote a well considered response based on going through council and his actual experience of dealing with GRC for his DA. His key point was to work with your engineer, which I completely agree with. However, from experience some hydraulic engineers are morons and you may need to seek a 2nd opinion from time to time. The starting point for you is to read clause 3.4 of the GRC's stormwater management policy which deals with alternate stormwater systems such as charged systems, absorption pits and easements etc. This will really help to bring you up to speed. They don't prohibit charged systems or absorption pits but you need to meet a bunch of criteria, like being able to demonstrate that you wont add to the flooding in certain catchments with the charged system and that you have the right soil type and suburb for the absorption system. A good engineer might be able to come up with a hybrid model for you, depending of course on your site conditions which we on the forum simply don't know. I have been building and developing a range of properties for over 25 years and I cant think of a time that I had a project refused because I couldn't get a stormwater easement over a neighbours property, or come up with a clever way to drain stormwater There is generally always a solution, just some solutions cost more than others and need some additional creativity. What I can add to this conversation ( in relation to Rob's post) is that with CDC council's engineers don't have to review your final design as they are not the approval authority, and therefore they don't have the discretion to enforce their own ideas that are outside of the policy. I have run countless DA's over the years and whilst I have had some great experiences, I have also had some really bad ones where council engineers try to impose their own design preferences to over ride councils policies. The way CDC works is that the hydraulic engineer will have to generally comply with the council policy but they are free to interpret the policy if they can come up with an engineering solution that meets the objective of the policy but is a better outcome. This will be based a lot of complex mathematics that the engineers will undertake. So in summary, read Clause 3.4 of the GRC Stormwater policy, educate yourself and go and seek a second option from an independent hydraulic engineer, or alternatively get yourself a better builder who can do all of this for you. have a great week Cheers Simeon Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 18Apr 13, 2021 12:37 am Simeon has given you some great advice there. Just also be aware of Section 2.3, I noticed that council have slipped in a new requirement for CDC projects to lodge plans and obtain council approval for half a dozen stormwater connection scenarios, one of which may include you (it certainly would have included us, under bullet point #1). Personally I think it's an over reach by council... my understanding of CDC is that it was implemented by the state government to give an alternative to the cumbersome, expensive and lengthy council DA process. Section 2.3 appears to be GRC reinserting themselves into the approval process for certain CDC projects. Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 19Apr 13, 2021 9:06 am robw17 Simeon has given you some great advice there. Just also be aware of Section 2.3, I noticed that council have slipped in a new requirement for CDC projects to lodge plans and obtain council approval for half a dozen stormwater connection scenarios, one of which may include you (it certainly would have included us, under bullet point #1). Personally I think it's an over reach by council... my understanding of CDC is that it was implemented by the state government to give an alternative to the cumbersome, expensive and lengthy council DA process. Section 2.3 appears to be GRC reinserting themselves into the approval process for certain CDC projects. Rob You get today's prize for the deep dive you did! that clause 2.3 is very interesting. I have never seen that imposed before, I just went and re read the act and I am wondering if they have found a loophole in clause 1.2 ( of the SEPP) as stormwater is discharging onto their asset. I wonder how this would go if tested in court as it seems contradictory to the purpose of the SEPP. Anyway, next step is to grab the minutes from the meeting last year and see how they justified it and then I am going to ask my planning lawyer for an opinion and report back. Not being a lawyer I am intrigued Well done Rob Simeon Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system? 20Apr 22, 2021 1:11 pm Hi all, Just thought I’d jump on here as we are also doing KDR in GRC, have a low level property and are going through CDC. GRC do have final say on the stormwater design unfortunately. Which sucks because the whole point of CDC is efficiency but it’s not when you still need council engineer approval. (Side note: it’s taken us 6 months to do cdc waiting for stormwater approval. Anyone else experiencing ridiculous delays??) We don’t have to get an easement but we did need a refusal letter signed by our rear neighbours. We’re proposing a charged system and it meets council’s requirement of draining by gravity from boundary to kerb. Not an engineer so apologies if I’m butchering the explanation haha. We’ve been told there were some amendments required from council this week but sounds like not major enough to tell us what (so I’m assuming charged line is a go). Hoping to FINALLY get approval next week. Just our personal experience, but hope you can find an alternative solution other than easement. Building Standards; Getting It Right! Hi All, We have a fall from road to garage front. But we cannot put a drain/grate because no discharge point put by the builder. Now they complain not enough space for… 0 9248 2 2531 You should be able to encase the sewer but you will need it designed and approved and access to lot 580 to do the work 2 17168 |