The Local Planning Panel is where a set of development applications are decided instead of by councillors or staff. Its agendas are published on the council’s documents portal, and this one went up four days ago.
What is on
Item 1. DA 1148/2025, 282 Burge Road, Woy Woy. Subdivision of two lots into two lots, demolition of the existing structures, and construction of a dual occupancy on Lot 2. The attachments are the most substantial of the three: a revised statement of environmental effects, redacted revised architectural plans, a revised stormwater plan, vehicle swept paths, a proposed subdivision plan, an assessment against the Central Coast Development Control Plan 2022 covering both 282 and 284 Burge Road, a water cycle management plan for 284 Burge Road, and a document titled “Clause 4.6 Minimum Lot Size”. That last title names the standard at issue, which the other two items do not.
Item 2. DA 609/2026, 10 Ascot Avenue, Avoca Beach. Alterations, additions and an inground swimming pool. Attached are notification plans, a BASIX certificate, a waste management plan, a geotechnical report, a clause 4.6 variation request, and a set of draft conditions and reasons. A geotechnical report on a residential alteration is ordinary enough on that stretch of coast; it is worth noticing rather than reading anything into.
Item 3. DA 630/2026, 302 Ocean View Road, Ettalong Beach. A two-lot subdivision. Attached are a subdivision plan, an assessment against chapter 2.4 of the Development Control Plan, draft conditions and reasons, and a redacted clause 4.6 variation document.
Two of the three, Avoca Beach and Ettalong Beach, already have draft conditions and reasons attached. That is normal practice and means the assessment work is done and a recommendation is in front of the panel; it does not tell you what the recommendation is.
The pattern worth naming
Clause 4.6 is the provision that lets a consent authority approve something that does not comply with a development standard, if the applicant makes a written case for it. Minimum lot size, height, floor space ratio: the standards are in the planning instrument, and clause 4.6 is the door out of them.
Every item on Thursday’s agenda has one. We are reporting that from the attachment list rather than from the applications themselves, and only the Woy Woy document names the standard being varied. We have not read the three variation requests, so nothing here says whether any of them is well founded, and the panel may agree or refuse in any combination.
What it does say is what this panel spends its time on. A meeting where all three items involve a request to depart from a standard is not an aberration; it is close to the point of having the panel. The useful thing for a resident is knowing that the question in front of it on Thursday is not really “should this be built” but “should this be built despite a rule saying otherwise”, three times over.
Who is actually reading these
The portal records how many times each document has been opened. Thursday’s agenda has been opened 33 times since 13 August. That is a small number for a decision on three properties, but it needs the fair comparison, so here is every meeting agenda the council has published in the last ten weeks.
| Meeting | Type | Views | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 June | Ordinary Council Meeting | 963 | 4.5 MB |
| 28 July | Ordinary Council Meeting | 845 | 2.3 MB |
| 7 July | Environment & Planning Committee | 310 | 4.4 MB |
| 4 August | Environment & Planning Committee | 309 | 481.4 MB |
| 18 June | Local Planning Panel | 265 | 14.9 MB |
| 28 July | Extraordinary Council Meeting | 246 | 0.8 MB |
| 2 July | Local Planning Panel | 242 | 16.1 MB |
| 9 June | Infrastructure and Assets Committee | 215 | 13.9 MB |
| 30 June | Coastal Estuary and Floodplain Risk Management | 194 | 16.9 MB |
| 7 July | Economic Development Committee | 189 | 1.1 MB |
| 11 August | Infrastructure and Assets Committee | 145 | 45.6 MB |
| 11 August | Governance and Finance Committee | 142 | 3.1 MB |
| 23 July | Local Planning Panel | 88 | 58.1 MB |
| 14 July | Community and Culture Committee | 84 | 0.6 MB |
| 4 August | Economic Development Committee | 77 | 23.2 MB |
| 20 August | Local Planning Panel (Thursday) | 33 | 26.1 MB |
Thursday’s figure is the lowest on the list, but it is also the youngest: the agenda has had four days where most of the others have had weeks, so it is not a fair comparison and we are not making one. The comparison that does hold is between meeting types over the same stretch. An Ordinary Council Meeting agenda draws 845 to 963 opens. A Local Planning Panel agenda draws 88 to 265. The meetings that decide what gets built at a specific address are read at a fraction of the rate of the meetings that decide everything else, and the panel meets online, which removes the room a person might otherwise turn up to.
How to read it yourself
The portal is at docspublished.com.au/centralcoastcouncil. Click the meeting title to expand the row first, then the Agenda link inside that row, which lands on a permanent link for that document. The buttons in the filter bar at the top are labelled with the same words and will rebuild the list instead. The agenda for Thursday is 26 megabytes, so it is a download rather than a read on a phone.