Last year, Portland’s Bureau of Development Services set itself a goal: reduce what was then a nearly 100-day wait time for new residential and commercial building permits. Currently, the wait time for new construction is nearly 200 days. But according to the city, and to a June report from the auditor’s office, the progress has been made. We’re joined by three members of the permitting improvement taskforce. Maurice Rahming is president of O’Neill Construction. Kurt Krueger is Portland Bureau of Transportation’s development review manager. And Terri Theison is the permit improvement strategy manager for the Bureau of Development Services.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: Last year, Portland’s Bureau of Development Services gave itself a goal to reduce what was then a nearly 100-day wait time for the approval of permits for new residential and commercial construction. Instead, those weights have only gotten longer, a lot longer in May, the average was approaching 200 days. Nevertheless, a new report from the Portland Auditor’s Office says that progress is being made. So for more on what’s happening and why this system is proving so difficult to streamline, we are joined by three members of the Permitting Improvement Task Force. Maurice Rahming is the president of O’Neill Construction, Kurt Krueger is the Portland Bureau Transportation’s Development Review Manager and Terry Tyson, a Permit Improvement Strategy Manager for the Bureau of Development Services. Welcome to all three of you. I want to start with a voice mail that came in and we have a number of voicemails because it probably wouldn’t surprise the three of you to know that a lot of Portland’s are not happy with the way things are right now. So this is Emily from North Portland.
Emily voicemail: I have been going through the City of Portland’s permitting process for 94 business days as of today to put on an addition to my home. I am general contracting this myself and I have to say out of all the city items I have gone through in the last 20 years of living here, this has been the most insanely epically horrendous experience that I’ve had with the City. The amount of red tape and nuance that a resident has to go through is too much. I’m a huge advocate for creating some sort of residential path to success that has some sort of concierge system to help people like me who are fairly attuned to getting through paperwork but stymied by the nuance of need, such as the font that is needed, which delayed me for 2.5 weeks, or erasing drafting lines, which seems pretty unnecessary for the project that we were doing. It’s taken emotional and mental years off my life. It’s actually been really terrible for my family. I have small kids, we’ve had to move out of our house and it’s been sitting there for nine weeks empty while the city is underemployed, understaffed and does not have the most adept systems moving people like me through.
Miller: Kurt Krueger, first did anything you heard from Emily in that voice mail surprise you?
Kurt Krueger: Unfortunately, no. Nothing there surprised me.
Miller: One thing that surprised me is the font. Does the City of Portland require you to put documentation in particular fonts?
Krueger: I can’t speak to Emily’s particular case. There are certain standards that we ask that plans conform with, so inspectors can read it in the field. Plan checks can occur or staff can read that adequately. So it doesn’t surprise me. There may have been a font issue, but I don’t know the specifics of that case.
Miller: Maurice Rahming, before you joined the task force, if I’d asked you your candid thoughts on permitting in Portland, what would you have said?
Maurice Rahming: I would have probably said that it was extremely challenging. One of the things I could say after being part of the task force is that the City actually has some really dedicated staff that really care about this issue. So they’re actually working hard. One of the challenges that occurs is just the different codes, whether they’re state, federal and local codes and the conflicts that happened there and the staff trying to navigate between what one particular code might impact another code. And so it’s really getting those bureaus, the leadership, staff and the clients like us all together to come up with a solution based approach. One of the things that I think about, listening to that [Emily Voicemail] is the 15 minute appointment that is new. That gives that early assistance so that people can get an idea of what they’re getting into before they get there.
Miller: How does a 15 minute appointment work?
Rahming: Well, one of the things that it does is if you have any questions, it is on the city’s website as well. But if you have any questions about your permit, whether it’s zoning, plan review, submitting bills, you could set up an appointment and actually go through it before you actually fill out the documents. And I’ll let Kirk also touch based on what it does.
Krueger: If I can just add to Maurice’s comments. I’m really excited that the city is offering a service. So if we flashback to January, February of 2020, there was a line of 25-30 customers that would fill our lobby waiting to get into the permit center to come meet with staff. And over the last year and a half, we’ve set up a 15 minute virtual appointment where applicants can schedule a scheduled time to meet with city staff virtually. They can submit their proposal, their questions in advance and city staff has an opportunity to spend a couple of days getting ready for that meeting, looking up answers to the questions that are posed, coordinating with other bureau staff and coming in ready to serve and provide better answers for our customers at a specific time.
Miller: Those 15 minutes that you’re talking about are striking to me because it reminds me of another voicemail that we got. I want to run this by you and then we’ll get your thoughts. This is from Dave, who is the owner of a sign making company.
Dave voicemail: It’s next to impossible. I’m trying to get permits for the third time this year, on three different signs. One, I finally got the permit for, after four months of waiting and multitudes of phone calls. Initially they said that they would accept mail-in forms. So I sent the mail-in forms. And then they informed me, through email, that they had recycled them because they don’t accept it. So they threw away, rather than sending back, all my signed paperwork, artwork files, everything to get a permit. Just in the time that I was trying to contact them, at 9:00 today, I went to Tigard and pulled a permit, within 15 minutes, for a sign identical to the one that they’re going to take months to get done for me. They are no help at all in Portland.
Miller: So Kurt Krueger, it’s one thing to have set up a system in Portland where people can get some answers and get some help in going through the permitting process in a 15 minute meeting. But what Dave here is saying is that ‘I got the full permit approved in Tigard, not a small city of 60,000 people, in 15 minutes’. If Tigard can do it, why can’t Portland?
Krueger: This isn’t my area of expertise. But I believe prior to the pandemic, we were allowing customers to come into the Permit Center to get permits like that walked through and issued the same day. We have been working on trying to provide that service virtually, again. I think we’ve been moving some of these smaller permits out of the larger system and are permitting those In same day or 24-48 hours now. So we’ve made a lot of improvements over the last year from where we were when we started the pandemic.
Miller: Terry Tyson, can you give us a sense for the bureaucratic complexity of Portland’s system? How many different offices or bureaus are involved if someone wants to just put in some medium sized addition to their home?
Terry Tyson: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thanks for asking it. It is a wildly complex system. I really empathize with Emily in particular in her voicemail. Customers have to interface, depending on the project, with up to seven different bureaus on one project. And that’s not with the same person. They’re interfacing potentially with seven different people or multiple people within those seven different bureaus to get their project through this complicated process.
Miller: What would it take to streamline that? Is it that we would actually need to have the City Council change city law, change ordinances?
Tyson: Another great question. So what we’ve been working on, through the task force, is bringing together all those bureaus to talk about how we can work better together. The task force has come up with some pretty strong recommendations that the City Council has now endorsed. And one of them is bringing together the infrastructure bureaus, for example, to work together under one manager, which will decrease from seven to about four bureaus that you would interact with. So that’s one step in the right direction.
We’re also working on sharing data and performance metrics so that everybody has a sense of how everyone else is doing and how we can work better together. And there’re multiple other recommendations we’ve passed. The Council, just in May as a recommendation of the task force, passed a resolution that new code and new fee changes can only be introduced at certain times during the year. Maurice, I think, has mentioned the complication of codes and how there are so many that need to be navigated and they’re being added constantly. And so we’re trying to streamline that and make that more predictable for customers and for staff.
Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now about the City of Portland’s efforts to improve, to streamline, to quicken its permitting process for additions and renovations and new construction. Wait times for some permits right now can take more than 200 days. Let’s listen to another voicemail. This is from D.C.
D.C. voicemail: Things would go smoother downtown if they could do something about the culture of adversarialism. Too many times, I’ve gone in for a commercial permit and it’s oddly and out of nowhere, seemingly very adversarial, as if they were defending the City from myself and the project.
Miller: Maurice Rahming is this something that you have encountered as a president of a construction company, as somebody who is pulling permits?
Rahming: One of the things that I think this actually helped me understand that occurs when you don’t understand the why of their doing something. So what sometimes happens, for example, is pre-issuance right? It’s a good example. We go in thinking ‘okay, we’re in pre issuance. We just need to give them the check and then we get our permit’? And actually with this conversation that we have, we realized that no, they still have to go through a series of checks. And so there’s the terminology. And we talked about this in the task force. The terminology that is being used can be a little misleading. So it’s like how do we clarify that? But at the end of the day, I really feel like everyone wants the same outcomes, They want to be able to get these permits issued faster, quicker and not hold back projects. But I think what occurs is that, because we don’t understand the why, it feels like it’s an adversarial relationship. But really once you start to understand more, then you realize that it’s where everyone’s trying to work as a team to deliver on a better City.
Miller: Let’s hear another voice mail. This came from Dan who is a general contractor.
Dan voicemail: There’s a domino effect when you slow up the process by asking inane questions then my contract is slowed up, which means I can’t commit to the subs, such as painting, plumber, electrician and everything gets completely whacked out of schedule. The whole process is completely inconsistent in every way you can think of inconsistency. The treatment of me from staff, the treatment between getting the permit and then the inspector and what they’re interested in, what they care about, the treatment of one project to another. That is, I’ve had multiple homes and got multiple permits and you get completely different questions and completely different reviews. And then the process overall is just not well put together. It needs a complete management review. The computer links don’t work, there are multiple online processes where you would enter information or try to find information. There’s not one web page. There’s just layer upon, layer upon layer of challenges. The city has been whipping this place into shape.
Miller: Kurt Krueger as Dan noted there are a ton of issues that he sees. But one of the ones in the middle of that voice mail that he really focused on is the inconsistency. From project to project or even within a project going from person to person, he might get different answers or different approaches even to the same basic issue or question. How do you explain that and how do you fix it?
Krueger: Thanks for that question. It’s a challenging one. I hate to blame the pandemic but it has made managing and doing some of this work much more challenging. Staff, when they were in the office, were much more collaborative. There were discussions that were occurring organically, that were helping to avoid those inconsistencies.
Miller: But if I may interject just one second, I absolutely remember hearing contractors or friends who are working on projects talk about all kinds of issues they had with permitting in Portland’s pre-pandemic. Not all these issues started in March of 2020.
Krueger: That’s fair. You’re absolutely right. There were plenty of issues that we knew we were wanting to work on. One of the things we’re actively working on, we spent an hour and a half this morning working on, is how we can better communicate better align with websites, consistent information, checklists that we want applicants to have, that don’t speak as individual bureaus, but speak as one voice from the City communicating to our customers. So they get a consistent message from the city staff and then can respond back to us similarly. It’s less project by project specific and more uniform.
Miller: Terry, it seemed like you want to jump in?
Tyson: Yeah, I’m sorry, I just wanted to address what Dan was saying about frustration with consistency because that is a huge problem. And it’s a problem because I think historically we have been working as separate bureaus. And what’s different about this is we’re working as a citywide service provider and focused on the customer. That has not necessarily been the way we’ve operated. This has been a system that wasn’t designed with intention. It was piecemealed together. And it’s gotten more and more complicated and we haven’t taken the time to really take a holistic view and put ourselves in the customer’s shoes while we take that holistic view. That is the barge, if you will, that we’re trying to turn right now.
Miller: Let’s listen to one more voice mail. This is from somebody who did not want to leave their name.
Anonymous voicemail: We have been working on a remodel, we sold the building and have been remodeling and we first started the permitting process in October of 2021. Today is July 18 and we’re still in that process. City of Portland has, what’s apparently, a totally legal bribery scheme with the permit process. So the Bureau of Development Services will tell you that it’s going to be X amount of time. You’re like number 100 or whatever on this list of permit applications. But if you want to pay the overtime of $2-$400 per hour, you can potentially get your permit expedited. I was shocked as a native Portlander and an Oregonian. I was shocked and appalled.
Miller: Terry Tyson is this system going to continue?
Tyson: I’m not really sure what she’s referring to, to be honest with you, Dave. We do have, and this is something that the audit that came out in March pointed out, we have a system that’s not equitable and doesn’t provide equal access all the time. And so we have been looking at that as well. There’s a process by which you can pay for a process manager for big huge projects. So she’s doing a building remodel, maybe that’s what she’s referring to. But to be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure.
Miller: Just briefly, in their recent follow-up report, auditors for the City wrote that sustained focused leadership remains necessary for these long term reforms to result in a noticeable change for Portland’s customers. Terry Tyson, how long are we talking about? How long is it going to be before these issues are fixed and we have 40 seconds for your answer.
Tyson: Well, you know, it’s taken us decades to get here. And when I started this position 11 months ago, I came into report after report and audit after audit that said some similar things. And what I can tell you is that now we have a citywide effort. We’re putting some resources and capacity into actually implementing some endorsed recommendations. We’ve already implemented some, I think, pretty significant improvements that are real customer focused. We have a lot of work still to do. So I can’t put a time frame on it. But I know I can say that we’re working together as quickly and as efficiently as we possibly can.
Miller: That was exactly 40 seconds. Terry Tyson, thank you. And Kurt Krueger, Maurice Rahming as well. Thanks to all of you.
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