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GPS pinpoints city's trees
They are part of the Council’s effort to pinpoint trees to ensure better planning processes. Processes involved are concerned with building consents, resource consents and LIMs (land information memoranda).They are complex procedures and all often involve trees on properties. A building consent covers just that: the structure of a building. It ensures that the building meets public health and safety conditions. A resource consent is concerned with land use and town planning (or the City Plan) dictates this. A LIM, held by the Council, contains all known information applicable to a property, including such matters as protected trees, a heritage building and flooding issues. All these processes can involve trees. So the Council records trees in three ways, too. Under the City Plan there are about 2500 listed notable or heritage-protected trees, another 1900 trees are protected on the sub-division list (most trees are protected under this classification), and nearly another 1000 are on the building consent list. Two Council staff are engaged to use GPS (Global Positioning System) to precisely pinpoint trees which have been given protection under one of the Council processes. The GPS information is then transferred to computer-held maps. The positions of the city’s trees then form part of an essential part of the consent processes. Each year the Council deals with more than 3000 resource consents, up to 9000 Project Information Memoranda, the same number of building consents, and more than 10,000 Land Information Memoranda. Incidentally, the city has about 17,000 trees in streets.
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