Proposed District Plan

What is the Gore Proposed District Plan?

The Proposed District Plan shapes how we live, work and play.

It is the community’s rulebook, ensuring the environment and the things people love about living in the Gore District are protected while still enabling growth and prosperity. The rules of our District Plan set out what activities you can do as of right (permitted activities) and what activities you'll need resource consent for.

These rules cover things like:

How you use your land
How your business operates within the District
Housing and zoning issues
Culture and heritage
Biodiversity and landscapes
Hazards, risks and more

As you can see, there’s something for all of us in the District Plan.

Why is the Gore District Plan being reviewed?

Our current District Plan became operative in 2006, so is overdue for a review.

We’re living in changing times, a changing world, and our District faces new challenges when it comes to how land is used, including climate change and natural hazards like flooding.

Under the Resource Management Act 1991, district plans should be reviewed every 10 years. Reasons our current plan needs updating include:

For us to comply with the ever-changing rules and regulations.
To bring the District Plan in line with the National Planning Standard. This standard provides a national framework to achieve national consistency for how plans are structured and written.
To give effect to relevant national direction, such as the National Policy Statement Urban Development that requires Councils to provide enough zoned and serviced land to meet future residential and business land needs.
Allows us to reassess environmental outcomes and priorities, and redefine our vision for the future of the District.

The current District Plan will remain in place until the Proposed District Plan is fully operative. However, as the Proposed District Plan moves through the formal process it has increased weight for considering resource consents for new activities and development. All the chapters, appendices and maps for the current plan are available on our Council website, just follow this link.

Some rules in the Proposed District Plan have immediate legal effect, more information on these rules can be found here.

District Plan Review Background

The Council's District Plan Review Sub-committee, Council staff, our District Plan consultants and Hokonui Rūnanga representatives have been working on the review since June 2020.

In 2022 the draft plan was released for public feedback. Over 100 individuals and organisations provided feedback. You can read the feedback by following this link.

Nearly 40 zoning changes were requested across the District, as well as a number of text changes to almost all chapters in the draft District Plan. Additional technical work was commissioned and undertaken to respond to a number of matters raised in feedback.

Some chapters were not incorporated into the Draft District Plan as they were awaiting national direction and further technical information. These chapters included:

Ecosystems and Indigenous Biodiversity
Natural Features and Landscapes
Development Areas

These chapters have been prepared separately and sent to key stakeholders for feedback. The Designations chapter has also been prepared following advice from Requiring Authorities.

The District Plan Review Team has finalised and integrated the Proposed District Plan to reflect feedback, technical advice, national direction, and to implement amendments based on Council and Hokonui Rūnanga recommendations.

How to use the Proposed District Plan

Here you will find all the chapters of our Proposed District Plan. To find out what is allowed to happen on a piece of land, you can locate a specific property and identify the zone it is located in on our digital map site. Here is a link to the site.

As well as the zones, you should also check for any ‘overlays’. An overlay identifies distinctive values, risks (such as a floodplain) or other factors that may require management in a different way to the underlying zone. Each zone and overlay has its own chapter containing the objectives, policies and rules.

Objective: the goal or outcome – what we want to achieve through our District Plan

Policy: sets out and indicates how we will achieve our goal or outcomes

Rule: identifies whether a consent is required and sets the standards that need to be complied with for an activity e.g. the hours you can operate your business or the height you can build your house.