The city-parish Department of Development is finalizing language on a new policy intended to speed up the lengthy plan review process, which has been a constant source of frustration in the local development community for the past 18 months.
The new policy, if implemented, would require the city-parish to process commercial plan applications within 21 days and residential plan applications within seven days—provided an applicant has already hired a third-party reviewer to separately perform a basic building plan review.
Parish law allows builders to hire third-party reviewers from among a list of state-certified engineers to review building plans for compliance with basic building code requirements.
But few developers have taken advantage of the ordinance, at least in part, because the city-parish typically takes so long to do its part of the review process—making sure building plans comply with things like local zoning codes and parking requirements.
Earlier this year, the Department of Development issued a request for proposals for firms interested in serving as an outside contractor to handle all plan review for the city-parish. But only three firms submitted proposals and all three were too expensive, according to Carey Chauvin, interim director of the department.
In the months since, the city-parish and the Baton Rouge Growth Coalition have been trying to develop another solution to the problem. For a time, Chauvin reallocated some of his staff from other divisions to help out in the plan review department. The temporary measure helped the department clear a significant portion of the backlog that had been building for months.
Since then, they have come up with the new policy. It doesn’t have any teeth or make any guarantees, but it at least encourages applicants to hire outside firms to handle a portion of the plan review process, thereby freeing up employees inside the department to do the rest of the job.
Larry Bankston, executive director of the Growth Coalition, says he is hopeful the new policy will help alleviate the long wait times that have bogged down so many projects in the area. But he says he believes that until the city-parish is able to retain a trained staff of plan reviewers—which is difficult because the positions pay so little—the situation will not ultimately be resolved.
“This is a step in the right direction, but it is not what ultimately needs to be done,” Bankston says. “I don’t believe the system can be fixed without some adjustment in salary.”
—Stephanie Riegel
