PERMITS—‘Faceless Bureaucrats’ Face Challenges of Their Own

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To many developers looking to build in the city of Los Angeles, the employees of the city’s planning and building and safety departments are merely faceless bureaucrats behind a counter.

And while those “faceless bureaucrats” are widely viewed as holding the key to a project’s success or failure, their jobs are no cakewalk.

The city workers who handle project permitting must deal with hundreds of people coming through their doors each week. Most of the cases are routine: a building permit here, a plan inspection there.

Many come in with very challenging projects, especially those trying to rehabilitate or convert older buildings downtown. And some are downright hostile to the city workers that they believe were put in their posts specifically to make their lives more difficult.

“Sometimes they yell, and sometimes they scream that they don’t want the city telling them what to do with their property,” said Osama Younan, mechanical plan check counter supervisor with the Department of Building and Safety.

“When that happens, it’s important for us not to take it personally,” Younan said. “We explain the reasons for the regulations and nine times out of 10 once they see that it’s really all about safety concerns, they understand. They may not like to pay out that extra money for the permit or the improvements, but they understand.”

Applicants also occasionally vent their frustrations at the city planning counter.

“We’ve had a few rude and unpleasant people through the years,” said Gordon “Murph” Miller, senior city planner. “One subdivision engineer (in the private sector) has a terrible attitude. At one point, he took his number, sat in a chair about five feet in front of the counter and pasted his number ticket on his forehead and glared at us until it was his turn.

“Another customer last year started yelling at us that he was a professional and deserved special treatment,” Miller said. “He was really giving the person behind the counter a hard time, so I came in, hopped on the counter, sat down cross-legged, smiled at him and we talked until we worked out his problem. It was somewhat humorous, but because I was higher than he was and made sure I was smiling, he soon realized it was hard to have an argument with someone grinning at him.”


Knowing the customers

But for these city bureaucrats, these outbursts are the exceptions. Most of the time it’s dealing with familiar faces contractors or development consultants who often know these bureaucrats by their first names and trade stories about friends and family. And most of the time, the transactions proceed smoothly and the projects go forward. Representatives for a developer like Tom Gilmore come in, present their plans, get the necessary paperwork approvals and go on their way.

That wasn’t always the case, though. Back in the waning years of the Tom Bradley administration and the early years of Mayor Richard Riordan’s tenure, the city bureaucracy was notorious for grinding very, very slowly. Downtown development proponents singled out the Building and Safety Department, claiming long delays and confusing paperwork trails prompted many hopeful developers to drop their plans, even before the devastating real estate downturn of the early 1990s.

“Stories about that department before the current leadership was put in place were legendary,” said Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Association. “In the last three or four years, though, people have been telling me that the department, while not perfect, is far more flexible, far more responsive and much easier to deal with.”

Perhaps one of the biggest changes has been the express permit system, where homeowners wanting to put in that bathroom, or apartment building owners wanting to put in that sauna, no longer have to go downtown to pull a permit. They can go online, pull down an application and fax it back to the city bureaucrats.

People with larger projects, like multi-story apartment buildings and shopping malls, must still get multiple permits from the planning department and the building and safety office.


Teams appointed

In those cases, a team of city officials from both planning and building and safety is put together to meet with the developer and project design team, according to Larry Brugger, director of the case management unit. Brugger has worked on such notable downtown projects as the Staples Center, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and developer Tom Gilmore’s three residential conversion projects.

“In most of these meetings, the developers want to comply with what needs to be done; they just need to be told what they have to do to comply,” Brugger said.

But in downtown, things can often be trickier. That’s because so many of the buildings are old and need major renovations before new projects can be put in.

“When you’re building a new structure from scratch, the design engineer has practically unlimited flexibility. With an older existing building, the designer sometimes has to be imaginative, and so do we,” Building and Safety’s Younan said.

The older buildings downtown can also yield unexpected problems.

“Whenever you work an old building, you never know what you’re going to get into,” Brugger said. “Sometimes a 100-year-old building may have had some work done on it 50 years ago, but you don’t discover that until you’re halfway through your current project. That can be very frustrating, because it throws off all your plans.”


Miscalculating permits

More typically, Brugger said, applicants come in and think they only need one or two permits, only to find out they need four or five permits from different departments.

“That’s when we try to get creative,” he said. “We tell them, ‘Look, if you change the parameters of your project just slightly, you might only need three permits instead of five.’ Or, if the applicant wants to put wood everywhere in a high-rise where it isn’t allowed, we’ll suggest alternative materials that might look like wood.”

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