Government employees in land development, zoning, planning, building and pretty much every other department you as a land developer need to get approvals from have a tremendous amount of power. They can deny a permit, delay it, or make the requirements of receiving that permit so expensive or so impossible that it makes a project not worth doing.
I have even been involved with situations where two agencies refuse to issue us permits until they see proof that we have already obtained permits from the other agency.
In other words, the building department will not issue you a building permit until you provide proof that the water department has issued you a water permit. But the water department has stated they will not issue you your water permit until you provide proof that you have been issued a building permit.
It can be a “hair pulling out” gauntlet of inefficiency at times.
Many agencies have goals of how fast they should process a permit. But during the boom times, when agencies were swamped with applications, we watched as these goals quickly went out the window and processing times got longer and longer. A permit that in 2003 took a month to get, at the end of 2006 took 3 to 6 months to receive.
Part of that is understandable, but what is remarkable is how little processing times have improved since the bust. Even though the workload is drastically reduced, the time to complete it has not followed suit.
Parkinson’s Law states that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” That appears to be what is happening today. Rather than reducing the time to process permits, government employees are filling that time with more work (i.e. more comments for plan reviews, more nit-picky requirements, more requests outside their authority.)
The impact of this is added expense to the land developer. Engineers, Architects, Surveyors, and Attorneys are the ones handling these extra comments, requirements, and requests, and they are turning around and billing that extra work to you!
You now have a situation where your land development team is taking just as long to get a project permitted as if it was 2006, but they are doing a lot more work on that permit than they normally would.
As a land developer you need to be aware of this change, and make sure your cost and time projections account for it.
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