Stormwater discharge: easement or drainage system?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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