Amenity

 

The District’s residents desire healthy and safe working, living and recreational environments. Generally, a high value is placed on their residential privacy and they consider that generous access to daylight, sunlight and private open space must be maintained, especially in urban areas.

 

Objectives and Visions

• To maintain and enhance a high standard of amenity in the built environment without constraining development innovation and building variety.
• To minimise the adverse effects created by building scale or dominance, shading, building location and site layout.

  

• To provide healthy and safe working, living and recreational environments by avoiding and mitigating the effects of excessive noise, vibration, odour and dust.
• To protect residential amenity by requiring compliance with minimum performance standards for noise, glare, odour, dust and vibration control which ensure that generated effects do not generally exceed background or ambient limits.
• To minimise the adverse effects of signage on the character of rural, residential, industrial and business areas

Pressures

The amenity and heritage values of Te Aroha and Matamata could be adversely affected by unsuitable development. It is acknowledged that the special amenity and heritage characteristics would be lost by rapid change to the existing physical characteristics of the built environment.

 

Amenity in rural areas may be compromised by rural activities that generate noise, odour, dust and other effects. In general, there is a higher degree of tolerance of the effects of legitimate farming activities. However in urban areas, and near large-scale rural industry there is an expectation that significant adverse effects on amenity values should be avoid ed, remedied or mitigated; and in many cases this will justify separation of potentially incompatible activities.

 

Increased signage and advertising can also impact upon the visual amenity and traffic safety of the environment.

 

(1) Transport and Environment Committee, 1998: Inquiry into the Environmental Effects of Road Transport, Interim Report of the Transport and Environment Committee, New Zealand House of Representatives