CPS Planning

You have a site with trees on it and a proposal you are trying to get through council. The tree report, the landscape design and the planning submission all have to say the same thing, and at CPS Planning they are produced under one roof by people already across your project. We run town planning, landscape architecture and arboriculture as a single practice, from offices at Surry Hills and Frenchs Forest, working across Sydney and the rest of NSW.

Directors Daniel Govers and Ben Tesoriero each bring more than twenty years to it, Daniel through the delivery of housing projects and both the UK and NSW planning systems, Ben as a town planner in NSW across statutory planning and development assessment. All of our consulting arborists hold AQF Level 5 qualifications, the Diploma of Arboriculture, and senior staff are registered or accredited with the peak Australian bodies including Arboriculture Australia and the Institute of Australian Consulting Arboriculturists. The team is trained in Tree Risk Assessment Qualification, Quantified Tree Risk Assessment and VALID methodologies.

Early in design development a preliminary tree report identifies the tree constraints while there is still room to move a footprint, setting out Tree Protection Zones, Structural Root Zones and retention values before anything gets locked in. Once the design settles, the Arboricultural Impact Assessment evaluates the effect of the development or construction on the existing trees, nominates what is removed and what is retained, and our tree protection specifications set out how the retained trees are looked after while the work goes on. For a Complying Development Certificate, a private certifier will usually want a statement from a consulting arborist confirming the tree impacts are acceptable and compliant, and we write those as well.

Away from development, tree risk assessments examine health and structure and report on the risk of failure and of harm, while tree surveys gather data across a whole site at once for schools, parks and hospitals and feed it into tree management plans. Street tree masterplans guide the long term planning and care of a council's street tree population. Where a proposal sits close to trees, root mapping establishes what is genuinely underground using excavation and ground penetrating radar, so the design can work off measurements. On site we provide supervision and certification, installing the protection measures and certifying that the conditions relating to tree preservation have been met, and we have acted as expert witness in Land and Environment Court matters. Send us the site and the proposal, and we will tell you which reports it needs and how they sit with the rest of the application.