After more than two years of working with the city-parish to find a solution to the lengthy plan review and permitting process at City Hall, developers are hopeful that help may finally be on the way.
The city’s Department of Development has entered into a pilot program with a private firm that is helping to do residential building plan reviews. If the process goes well and the firm is able to make a significant dent in the workload of the city-parish’s overworked and understaffed department, it may enter into a more permanent arrangement for both residential and commercial building plan reviews, depending on the cost.
Larry Bankston, executive director of the Growth Coalition, says Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s administration entered into the pilot program in January and has been very willing to engage with the development community on the issue, which has been one of the biggest headaches facing developers for the past several years.
Bankston says he doesn’t have any data yet to demonstrate that the pilot program is helping to speed up the residential plan review process, but anecdotal information suggests so far it is a success.
“This is something we’ve been pushing for,” Bankston says. “Based upon the discussions we’ve had it looks like it is working and they have it up to the quality they would like.”
Last year, the Growth Coalition was pushing a policy that would have required the city-parish to process commercial plan applications within 21 days and residential plan applications within seven days—provided the applicants had already hired a third-party reviewer to separately do basic building plan reviews. But they shelved the issue after the August flood hit.
Bankston says if all goes well with the third-party firm currently under contract, he thinks developers would be willing to pay an extra fee for expedited plan reviews.
“Speaking for the Growth Coalition, I think developers would be OK with an additional fee for some sort of speed review,” he says. “Then, those people who are in no big rush can continue to go through the same process. Those who need some expedited review can pay an additional fee in order to get it done.”
—Stephanie Riegel
