For those who have lost their homes and businesses in the historic Palisades and Eaton wildfires, the additional burden of navigating a layered, inefficient and uncertain governmental bureaucracy, is debilitating. Time is not an ally as families and businesses assess how best to rebuild their lives and regain stability. Clear and predictable permitting time frames, along with certainty regarding desired and anticipated outcomes, will positively influence the decision to rebuild homes, businesses, and communities.
As the City and County of Los Angeles recover from January’s destructive wildfires, the critical pathway to achieve a rapid and sustainable recovery is a simplified and expedited building permit approval process that supports the rebuilding efforts of homeowners and businesses.
The governor, the mayor of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have uniformly recognized the importance of this through Executive Orders and decrees over the past 60 days. The stated goal of these directives is to shorten the extended, often year’s long permitting process, to a period of 30 days or less. For both the City and County of Los Angeles, this represents an ambitious and long overdue initiative to sharply pivot from “business as usual.” It will require new and innovative thinking about how best to facilitate and support the rebuilding effort.
The need to ‘move forward aggressively’
The City and County should move forward aggressively to implement a streamlined and fully integrated “self-certified” building permit program that can meet the stated 30-day goal for permitting new homes and businesses. The “self-certified” program can serve as the critical catalyst for the Palisades and Altadena communities to recover and rebuild rapidly and effectively.
A successful self-certification program will increase the City and County’s permitting capacity while maintaining rigorous professional accountability, regulatory standards, and integrity.
In the face of the City of Los Angeles’ nearly $1 billion budget deficit, permit self-certification will allow the City to focus precious resources where they are needed most, enabling safe, efficient building.
Permit “self-certification” has been successfully implemented in other cities around the country, including New York, Chicago, Phoenix and San Diego.
Self-certification programs are voluntary programs to expedite the issuance of building permits without reducing a building’s integrity and adhering to all life safety codes, requirements and building standards.
The programs enable licensed architects and engineers to bypass the standard plan review process and obtain approvals for permits in a matter of days. Licensed architects and engineers can “self-certify” building plans and specifications as compliant with building code requirements and standards. A professional self-certification program should include qualifying criteria for licensed architects and engineers, including minimum years of experience, specialized training or certifications, demonstrated knowledge of relevant building codes and mandatory continuing education requirements.
The City and County should plan for and establish a specialized and dedicated inspection team, staffed by the most experienced inspectors.
In anticipation of what will likely be thousands of building permits and plans submitted to the City and County of Los Angeles, the City and County should request budget authorization or reallocation to recruit additional staff to carry out these duties.
Recruiting must start now
Given the lead time involved in hiring and training staff members, the effort to recruit new staff members should start immediately.
In many cities that already have self-certification programs, participating professionals must attend and successfully complete self-certification training classes. Jurisdictions reserve the right to conduct random inspections and audits of permits under the program to verify proper project completion and self-certification. They can also require remedial work when it is discovered that work was not done in conformance with applicable codes.
If a project is found to be in non-compliance, the self-certification approval may be revoked, and the engineer or architect may be deemed ineligible to utilize the self-certification program moving forward, alongside other fines and penalties.
Finally, the City, County and building industry professionals should begin to adopt and implement newly emerging, state-of-the-art digital technologies and other AI tools that support the review of building plans.
These emerging tools are regularly updated as building codes and development standards change over time. The emerging digital technology can be used by the licensed industry professionals performing self-certifications and City and County project permit coordinators at the one-stop permitting centers. These tools can also include mobile features and applications to assist the City and County’s dedicated inspection units.
The overburdened City and County permit departments have long needed an expeditious alternative that self-certification offers. The property devastation of recent fires makes change even more important. That’s why permit self-certification is among the central recommendations in “Project Recovery: Rebuilding Los Angeles after the January 2025 Wildfires,” the comprehensive report recently published by the Los Angeles District Council of the Urban Land Institute, the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.
Building permit self-certification represents the most promising public and private sector response to the pressing need for a rapid, efficient, rigorous, and reliable rebuild and recovery from January’s devastating wildfires. If not now, then when?
David Waite is a Partner at Cox Castle & Nicholson and also serves on the ‘Project Recovery’ Governance Committee.
