October Release: Planning Proposals, Project Remediate and more

The ePlanning Program regularly deploys system updates and enhancements to our services on the NSW Planning Portal.

The following is an overview of the enhancements and technical releases for the ePlanning Digital Services for the month of October.

Online Planning Proposals Service

There have been several key enhancements to Planning Proposals this month, including:

• Workflow changes to reduce the turnaround time of resolving a case that is lodged by DPIE. It is routed to DPIE for assessment whilst also allowing an opportunity for council to provide feedback.
• Active Management Plan to enable the case manager users to modify the end date during various stages in the process.
• GIS Spatial viewer will be embedded in the system. GIS users will be able to perform related activities, and other users will be able to view the proposal location in the embedded map.

eConstruction

In collaboration with the Office of the Building Commissioner, ePlanning has released a new service on the NSW Planning Portal. Digital Worker is an AI-based service which will help the Design and Building Practitioners (DBP) Audit team to review the lodged design documents with mandated title blocks for compliance with the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020. It will improve the efficiency of the audit process by reducing the time spent on manually opening each document with multiple pages and reviewing each title block individually.

Project Remediate

Also in collaboration with the Office of the Building Commissioner, ePlanning has released the Project Remediate service. This will enable developers who have registered for removal of combustible cladding from Class 2 buildings, either through a DCO or DA/CDC to initiate a case in the NSW Planning Portal, upload their DBP Act compliance documents and declare and lodge their CIRDs in order to receive their Remedial Assurance Certificate.

Short-Term Rental Accommodation (STRA)

Several significant changes have been made in the STRA Registration Portal to enable businesses to deliver the STRA SEPP:

• User Interface enhancements have been introduced to improve user experience
• Users can enter host details, appoint facilitators, and perform self-bookings
• Users can see reports of their properties via the booking platforms and self-booking system
• Implementation of a 180-day counter for registered properties within certain LGAs to comply with legislation
• Improvements made to fire-safety regulations
• Councils can view reports for all properties within their LGA.

APIs have also been built to provide a list of registered short-term rental properties and update booking information in the STRA Portal. Below is a list of APIs that have been deployed as part of the October release:

• GetPropertyDetails: This operation will enable the booking platforms to see the current status and day limit count (current year and following year) of a particular property on the STRA register. This can be used by the booking platforms to validate their listings.
• ManageBookings: This operation will enable the booking platforms to update the STRA register with new bookings or modifications of existing bookings, including cancellations.
• GetBulkPropertyDetails(): This operation will return a master list of all properties within the STRA register.
• SubmitBulkBookings(): This operation will enable the customer of the API to all booking providers to create, modify and cancel bookings in the STRA register.
• ResponseBulkBooking(): This operation will enable the booking providers to see the status of previous bulk booking calls.

Portal Integration – API BAU

Minor enhancements have been applied to existing API services, including Online DA, State DA, Certificate Registration, Online Concurrence and Referral, Online CDC, Online Post-Consent Certificate Services and Section 68.

Following on from the positive feedback from integrators last month, end points are now being provided for the CDC service, enabling integrators to understand the mandatory, conditional and expected values and document types for UI attributes, as per the operation or service.

Special Infrastructure Contributions (SIC)

This release contains several minor fixes and enhancements to the Illawarra Shoalhaven (ILSH) SIC workflow, including:

• the application of indexation
• updates to several documents to include a ‘COVID-19 discount’ reference
• a screen navigation issue for the assessment officer when processing submissions that have a manual address entered.

A small number of enhancements have also been applied to the Western Sydney Growth Area (WSGA) NDA documents.

Data Warehouse

The following enhancements have been made this month:

• The implementation of Concurrence and Referral data within the Data Warehouse
• The ability to update the data model with PEGA feeds daily through ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines
• Creation of required database views to facilitate the use of data for reporting.

Major Projects

An extensive list of enhancements has been made to Major Projects this month, including:

• Increased visibility within the Forecast Date Table, so that planners have full visibility of the progression of their case
• Clearer Due Date details have been provided when public authority engagement is created
• Planners and compliance users can edit Requests for Information, such as renaming or uploading new documents
• Planners and internal users of the same workgroup, including administration and compliance officers, can rename any documents on the Make Documents Public page, so that the document titles can be more descriptive for proponents
• Compliance officers can set dates within the system to accept current and past dates including weekends, so that they have more flexibility in capturing case events
• Currently, planners use Update Due Date/Forecast Date as a separate option. This will now be disabled to encourage planners to use the Classification Table.

Detailed release notes for these services are available in the Knowledge Management section of the Portal.