Council officials have admitted they did not receive a resource consent application for the doomed McLaren Valley Falls music festival which was scheduled to take place In January.

Promoter Paxton Talbot went public with his plans for the three-day McLaren Falls event earlier this year, but had not secured the venue despite selling tickets and announcing the line-up.

McLaren Falls. Photo: File.

The international Bay of Plenty festival was subsequently called off earlier this week and relocated to an unknown location in Auckland.

The site is a joint Tauranga City Council and Western Bay of Plenty District Council operation, with the required consent application required to be filed through the latter.

However, Western Bay Environmental Consents Manager Chris Watt says they never saw an application for the proposed McLaren Falls event.

'In the early stages, there was possibly a window where they could have achieved the January date,” says Chris. 'But in saying that, it could of course have been appealed, which would have taken it beyond that date.

'The only option available to the organisers was to go through a non-notified process, and all of the people affected would need to have given written approval.

'If the application had been publicly notified with a required consultation process, the time frame involved would have meant the resource consent would not have been issued in time for January 2016.”

Chris' understanding is that an acoustic report demonstrated the noise effects of the proposed event would be more than minor, and in that regard the organisers needed to get the approval of the people affected.

'If they haven't got those approvals, their chances of getting approval on a non-notification process become a lot slimmer,” says Chris.

'Had they secured all those persons considered affected, then a non-notification pathway was likely

'I understand they were after 40-odd written approvals. When we assess the application formally we would determine if there were actually more persons affected. We could actually send them back to get more.

'But until you actually have a tangible application and can assess it properly, it's a little bit up in the air.”

Indications suggest there was a very early discussion with Western Bay of Plenty District Council planning staff in February this year.

'And then it went away,” says Chris. 'It was only when it came back in June/July when discussions started to ramp up and it became more meaningful event.”

The festival went public in July, billed as a three-day event intended to attract over 10,000 people.

However, issues still remained as the Western Bay District Plan in place does not envisage anything on that scale.

'The district plan allows for carnivals and temporary activities, and there's no cap on the numbers,” says Chris.

'But when you are looking at the duration of setting up for the event, running the event and then taking everything down, it was quite limited by the plan.”

'It hit another gear and one of the other things was obviously looking at noise and traffic, which again set it outside those sort of permitted activities.

'If you have a small school carnival or something like that, those sort of things work because they are easy to set up, run and take down. But a larger concept is obviously a bit more difficult.

The New Zealand Transport Agency did sign off on the traffic issues, but council admit they never saw any data regarding logistics, a power supply, water and toilets.