Can local councils charge for emailing you property information?

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Forums › Home Workshop DIY › Can local councils charge for emailing you property information?

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mattwnz

20164 posts

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#1776551 5-May-2017 19:57

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Gordy7:

It was free at our council to look at the property builders file (3 years ago).

I just took along my smart phone and snapped everything.

It is free with my local council too, you just type in the address to the foyer PC and up it pops. However if I want to go into this other council offices to view them, their fee schedule states they now charge for searching for the plans in 10 minute intervals. So there doesn't seem to be a free way to do it. I have contacted the council though to provide clarification on their fees, because they are not clear at all.

mattwnz

20164 posts

Uber Geek

#1776560 5-May-2017 20:06

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E3xtc:

not specifically related to the charging for getting this information; but I ordered a pdf (on cd) of our property file. Thought the price was "within reasonable limits" for the task at hand so paid it without issue...but what i had a problem with was when I went to use the content in earnest (about 12-18 months later), the resolution of the scanning meant that many of the plans were illegible. They (at least for ours) scanned what would have been A2 files (potentially) down to A4 (pdf) with a massive loss in resolution. Really disappointing. Had to guess what a lot of the pixelation was saying :(

Not sure that level of resolution loss should be occurring. Although I have certainly noticed that the PDFs are a lower quality than if you were viewing the A1 and A2 plans in person. But it may depend on the technology at the time they were scanned in. But having them all electronic potentially could cause major problems down the track. What if a councils servers were hacked and the files deleted? Or they had a major hardware failure, or fire etc. Or whether these files will continue to be able to be accessed as technology improves. I can't see the Adobe PDF format being used in 50 years time. For example the adobe flash format, that is now almost dead, due to decisions by hardware makers not to support it.

I can see a cost if they were sending a physical medium, such as a CD or USB stick, and some councils do seem charge for this. But not for a drag and drop file that already exists, and is emailed. But maybe it is a case of them not adequately explaining why there are costs involved with doing this for me.

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