by Bradley Parson
Staff Writer
When the mayor’s committee charged with improving City permitting meets Monday it will consider eliminating overlapping reviews of construction projects, adding staff and cutting applicants’ wait time in half.
Those measures were mentioned repeatedly by builders and developers at an earlier meeting. Mayor John Peyton and City Council president Lad Daniels brought City planners and inspectors together with State regulators in December to hear the public’s most common gripes with Jacksonville permitting. The notes recording user complaints ran more than 100 pages, and the issue of overlapping reviews became the meeting’s dominant theme.
Veterans of the process said plans would pass one review only to be nixed by another agency using the same criteria. The process took too long, several said. It often took longer to get plans approved than to complete the projects once construction started.
The City’s director of Public Works, Lynn Westbrook, said the City got the message. The City is in the process of stripping away redundant, repetitive reviews, he said.
“Some redundancies have already been eliminated,” he said. “The biggest thing we’re trying to do is make sure, among the City departments, that we don’t have different people looking at the same things.”
Overlapping reviews lead to inconsistency and delay, said Westbrook. One inspector may interpret a set of plans differently from another. When the reviews don’t match up, approval is denied and the process repeats.
Several builders complained at the December meeting that approval on even small projects could take as long as two to three months — each review can stretch as long as 30 days.
One of the most interested observers of the mayor’s permitting initiative is State Rep. Stan Jordan. His attempts to develop a North Main Street lot have provided first-hand experience navigating the permitting maze.
“Just the time involved to get a permit back, you’d think I was building the Hoover Dam,” said Jordan.
Because permitting often requires approval from State and federal inspectors as well as local, Jordan said he would back the improved process in Tallahassee.
To shorten the process will require more inspectors. Westbrook said the Council’s committees will consider a bill next week to add nine employees to the Building Inspections division. Local builders have requested review be shortened from 30 days to 14. Westbrook said the extra hires would be a step in that direction, but he didn’t know if two weeks was a reasonable expectation.
“It’s really a matter of resources,” said Westbrook. “We’re always looking at ways to turn around information to customers as quickly as possible, but whether we get to 14 days, I don’t know. I’d say it’s a stretch goal that we’ll continue to look at.”
After the Monday meeting, Westbrook said the improvement process’ next big step would be to examine the most successful aspects of other cities’ permitting systems. City planners will travel to Hillsborough and Lee counties in Florida, and to Phoenix and Charlotte. Westbrook said they will visit the sites throughout April and should file reports on their best practices by the middle of May.
Westbrook said the mayor’s committee should make recommendations — if it determines changes are needed — by the middle of June. The City will spend to hire the extra building inspectors, but Westbrook said the committee was focusing on less-costly measures in its permitting fix.
“We’re not so much looking at dollars; we’re looking at process, we’re looking at what are the services we need to offer to make the process as customer friendly as we want it to be,” said Westbrook.