A mate of mine set up a specialist gym to train commonwealth athletes - the gym is designed to be used by a maximum of 10 people at once since it's so specialised and basically it's his wife and a trainer who do the work, plus he comes in to do some training himself. All up at most there's maybe 14 people on site. The council required that he have 20 parking spaces before he was allowed the permit to run the join. Apparently councils aren't that great at math.
It gets better. Council planning officers base a lot of their decisions on what they like and what they don't.
There's covenants and stipulations that can be removed, but someone who's been there for 30 years made the decision back in the 90s or 80s and won't budge.
Yeah, this is one of my biggest fears living in an outer suburb - I want to build a car port which requires a permit, and while there are one or two others on the street that would have a carport of some form of structure out as far as what I want to build, I wouldn't be surprised if they knock mine back because "reasons". Getting knocked back for the carport means having to reconsider a lot of things with the house (currently the car has a carport but it's actually under the structure of the house itself, which could really easily be repurposed into another room which we desperately need).
Councils can get in the bin with their stale selves.
There are planning consultants that can help out. Unfortunately they can cost a pretty penny. The good thing about them is that they have contacts in the council and can pretty much tell you on the spot if it's going to be a yes or a no.
Oh awesome - thank you so much for that. I don't mind if it costs (well, within reason) since the difference between this project and the alternative is likely going to be in the hundreds of thousands anyway. But if we could get told that what I want done is okay, then it would be incredible. I'll have a look around and see if I can find a planning consultant.
What an absolute wank. There's a fair bit of parking around (literally across from the building). Most of it paid, so more money for the council? I would imagine the strip of restaurants would welcome more hungry patrons too.