It’s important to know how considerations are detected in Rico to know what you’ve covered and ensure you don’t miss anything.
Considerations are detected in three stages: through the Subject Site GIS Data, through the Project Checklist, and manually at the user's discretion on the Considerations page. What’s covered and what isn’t for each of these stages is described below.
Subject Site
The Subject Site page detects considerations that apply to a subject site, based on GIS Data for that land.
Exception: Considerations that do not apply based on a subject site’s GIS Data (for example it only applies to a neighbouring site and not the subject site) aren’t detected. In rare cases, such situations can still result in considerations being relevant to a proposal. To ensure these are detected, we suggest reviewing the GIS Images on the Subject Site page for any features applying to neighbouring sites (and not the proposal) that may result in relevant considerations.
Project Checklist
Site Features
In addition to the considerations detected on the Subject Site page, checklist questions aim to filter out considerations where their relevance is determined by the presence of a feature on and around the subject site that cannot be inferred automatically using GIS Data.
Activities
In addition to considerations detected by site features, further checklist questions aim to filter out considerations based on activities involved in a proposal. To do this, questions prompt you to recall any activities in your proposal that relate to a specific planning consideration. It’s not practical for us to ask you about every specific activity in a proposal at the checklist stage. Instead, Rico relies on you to relate the characteristics in your specific proposal to the questions asked and research an answer further where you’re unsure. You can investigate whether an underlying consideration is relevant to your proposal by answering yes to a question. This will display the consideration and let you jump refer directly to source planning documents (in the case of planning document considerations) to see whether it’s relevant.
Exception: Planning documents can also be relevant where they contain matters (but not rules) that are relevant to a proposal’s assessment. The Project Checklist does not flag such documents and they must be added manually on the Considerations page. Such cases are rare, and when they exist, they are generally referred to by a planning document with rules that has already been detected (for example, refer to matters in ABC Planning Document for assessing applications triggering a given activity).
Considerations
The vast majority of considerations are detected through the Subject Site and Project Checklist pages, as described below. Where there are exceptions, like those described in the sections above, they must be manually added here.