Fed up with persistent delays in the city-parish’s permitting process, Metro Councilman Ryan Heck is proposing an ordinance that will require the Department of Development to act on a permit application within 10 days.
Language in the ordinance says if an application is not disapproved or deemed insufficient or incomplete within 10 days of its submittal, it will automatically be approved.
“The process is taking too long, and we need to acknowledge and try to address that,” says Heck, who, like many in the development community, has been frustrated by the slow pace of the city’s permit review process for nearly a year. “This ordinance does that. If you don’t get an answer within 10 days, you can start construction.”
Heck and the Baton Rouge Growth Coalition have met periodically over the past year with Carey Chauvin, interim director of the Department of Development, to devise a solution to the permit application logjam, which has caused headaches for builders, contractors and developers trying to get their projects started.
Chauvin has attributed the problem primarily to personnel shortages and high turnover. Three of five plan review positions were vacant for much of last year, and filling them was difficult because the starting salary is only around $30,000.
In recent weeks, Chauvin has brought employees from other departments to help cover the workload, and he says the office is now caught up with where it needs to be.
“Our plan review time, on average, is now seven to 10 days for residential and three to four weeks for commercial,” he says. “That’s a big improvement over the eight to 10 weeks for commercial we were averaging before.”
Larry Bankston, executive director of the Growth Coalition, and Heck say while they appreciate the efforts of Chauvin’s department, they’re not hearing, anecdotally from those in the industry, that the plan review process is moving appreciably faster these days. That’s one reason Heck is filing his ordinance now.
“I continue to receive complaints,” he says. “Sometimes it’s an error on the part of the applicant or a miscommunication, so there is blame to go around, but the bottom line is the process is taking too long.”
Chauvin says the city-parish continues to explore the possibility of farming out the plan-review process on an as-needed basis to a third party firm. But he says structuring the contract has proven more difficult, legally, than originally anticipated.
“It’s still a work in progress,” says city-parish Chief Administrative Officer William Daniel, who is working on the issue with Chauvin. “Can we do better? No question. We’re trying to come up with a solution that will allow people get permits as fast they want to.”
—Stephanie Riegel
