Garry Muir had heard the horror stories: It could take a year or more to get government permits to open a bar or restaurant.

But much to Muir’s surprise, it only took him and his business partner five months to open Stave Bar in downtown Long Beach last year, thanks to the city’s recently implemented speedier permit process. Muir had to shell out a few thousand dollars in extra fee payments to get expedited service, but it was worth it.

“Opening six months earlier made a huge difference,” he said.

Muir, 40, is just one of hundreds of restaurant and bar owners who have benefited from recent moves by several cities in Los Angeles County to speed up permitting. Los Angeles was first three years ago, with a program designed to cut the process to six to nine months, down from as much as two years. Glendale followed with a similar program for its arts and entertainment district. Last year, Beverly Hills, Long Beach and Pasadena launched their own programs.

“We specifically looked at Los Angeles, with its promise to get permits out the door in 90 days and we decided to deliver an even faster turnaround time of 70 days,” Beverly Hills Mayor Willie Brien told the Business Journal last week.

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster said his city had to send a signal that it was moving to be more business friendly.

“The fact is the permitting process is often the first impression a business or company has of Long Beach,” Foster said. “We need to do it right.”

The permitting delays were not small matters, especially for small businesses or one-off restaurant operators. That’s because they racked up rent and other expenses month after month – with no income – while the lengthy permitting process played out.

There was a widespread belief that the long processes crimped restaurant startups – which was made visible by the recession.

“What prompted us to do this was seeing more empty storefronts in the retail portion of our city during the economic downturn,” Brien said. “We wanted to make sure that the city was poised to take advantage of a turnaround when it arrived by making it easier for restaurants to open.”

Restaurant delays

All retail operations must get permits to open, but it’s been notoriously difficult to open restaurants because cities require many more permits largely because of food-handling and worker-safety issues. Permits and inspections are needed for plumbing and electrical work, ventilation, fire safety and even outdoor patio seating.

Restaurateurs often had to wait more than six months to get routine permits in cities across the county. In Los Angeles, they could even wait a year. Then, when they got the permits and construction or remodeling could begin, projects that otherwise might take a few months to build could end up taking more than a year in Los Angeles and up to six months in surrounding cities because of building inspections.

Now, in Los Angeles, it generally takes 90 days to get permits; in other cities, typically 30 to 45. The inspection process has been shortened to six months in Los Angeles and three or four months in other cities.

Los Angeles, with its sprawling bureaucracy and where departments rarely coordinated their activities, was the worst. One restaurant owner told the Business Journal that in 2010 it took nearly two years to get all the city permits to open a restaurant in downtown. The economy was booming when she first applied, but by the time she got her permits to open, the recession had come. She was forced to close within months.

Los Angeles and other local cities set up express permit programs to coordinate all city agencies involved in restaurant issues. Instead of moving sequentially from one agency to the next, the prospective restaurateur is allowed to apply for permits at all agencies simultaneously, with one city staff worker designated to guide the applicant through the process.

“Before, you were dealing with a silo structure,” said Bill Chait, co-owner of Sprout Restaurant Group, which has opened more than six local restaurants in the past four years, including Bestia in downtown Los Angeles and Short Order at Farmers Market in the Fairfax district. “Now, especially in Los Angeles, that structure has been eliminated and it typically takes us less than a month to get our permits.”

Similarly, in Beverly Hills, new restaurant owner Bernhard Mairinger got his permits to open Austrian eatery BierBeisl in less than a month; rehabbing the vacant restaurant space on Little Santa Monica Boulevard only took a couple of more months; the restaurant opened last March.

“I had definitely heard of stories of it taking a year or more to open a restaurant,” said Mairinger, 28, who left his chef post at downtown L.A.’s Patina Restaurant in late 2011 to strike out on his own. “But going for our permits all at the same time really saved us a lot of time.”

Other troubles

There might be a cost for speed. Many of the departments in Long Beach have programs where permit applicants can pay an additional fee (typically several hundred dollars) to get their application fast-tracked.

Stave Bar owner Muir chose the fast-track option every time it was offered; he estimated that he paid a cumulative total of between $5,000 and $10,000 to have all the permits fast-tracked. But he believes this saved him up to six months in wait times, allowing his restaurant to open that much earlier so it could start bringing in revenues.

Even though the situation has improved for city permitting, restaurateurs still sometimes have to contend with delays in getting their health permits, and state alcohol and liquor licenses. But even those problems are improving.

Mairinger was fortunate: He went into a vacated restaurant space that already had a state alcohol license. For other restaurateurs who go into abandoned retail storefronts, getting an alcohol or liquor license from the state can be cumbersome. In most instances, the restaurateur must get a conditional use permit, which requires a public hearing; that process alone can take three months. Since these are state requirements, cities have little ability to streamline this process, so even after the cities have instituted their fast permit programs, getting that alcohol license can be a big stumbling block.

It’s much the same when dealing with the county Public Health Department, which oversees restaurant health inspections. While the department has improved its permit turnaround times – from up to six months to as little as two months – it still takes a significant amount of time.

“While these cities have made great strides in speeding things up, opening a restaurant is still determined by the slowest link in the chain,” said Jerry Prendergast, a restaurant consultant in Culver City. “In some cases, that’s the conditional use permit process; in others, it’s the health department.”

Long Beach and Pasadena have their own health departments, which makes things easier. In Long Beach, for example, a health department employee has been stationed inside the development services office with the sole task of working with and reviewing restaurant and bar applications.

“We make sure to involve the health department – and all our departments – when the applicant first walks in the door,” said Angela Reynolds, deputy director of development services for Long Beach. Reynolds was brought in a year ago specifically to help implement the city’s express restaurant program.

For Muir in Long Beach, the biggest surprise was that it was so easy to get approvals for an indoor patio.

“I thought it would take a few months, what with a fire pit and gas lines; instead, it only took three to four weeks to get the patio approved,” he said.