Time allowed for community councils to respond to planning applications is under review by Fife Council.
Following the resignation of the St Andrews community council planning convener the local authority announced it will reconsider the 14-day period permitted for submissions.
Penny Uprichard resigned from her post due to the “restrictive” timescales which she said made the role too time consuming.
Community councils have seven working days from the publication of weekly planning applications to request to be statutory consultees, giving their objection more weight than that of an individual member of the public.
They then have 14 days to lodge their objection or supporting comments.
Miss Uprichard said St Andrews must be the most development-prone small town in the UK, with more than 150 plans submitted in the last six months.
“St Andrews Community Council only objects to a small proportion of applications, but the time allowed for responses is completely inadequate,” she said. “If community councils don’t comply with these limits they receive an immediate computer-generated letter ruling them out of time.
“The system makes no allowance for holidays, illness or applications with hundreds of documents.
“The council itself can take up to a year to bring major developments to committee, but is inflexible about community council and public responses.”
Miss Uprichard has also been at loggerheads with the council over its insistence that the seven working days from the publication of the list on Mondays ends the following Tuesday rather than the Wednesday.
Service manager Mary Stewart said the seven-day process had been reviewed and as the list is published before 1am the Monday counted as the first day.
She added: “In practice, community councils will be aware of the submission of many of these applications before the weekly list is published because of the monitoring options available on the planning online system.
“In response to the difficulties being expressed by Ms Uprichard, we are currently reviewing the process and time allowed for community councils to then submit their responses.”