It takes a long time to get a building permit. We all know that. In fact the state of Washington knows that. It takes so long that the state legislature passed RCW 36.70B (also called SB 5290) which governs the timelines and processes that local municipalities such as cities and counties are required to follow in the review of permit applications. This sounds like good news right? While the is good, the execution seems to have the opposite effect of causing permits to actually take longer to get reviewed. Let's explore.
The main idea of this legislation is so a basic residential project should take less than 65 days of review time by a building department. A more complicated project that requires notice to the public should take less than 100 days such as complicated property subdivisions or environmental impacts. These are calendar days! Additionally, procedures are put in place to require a determination of completeness within 28 days of applying for a permit, a single point of contact for your application if you have questions, and a notice of decision for permit reviews within the required time period. We will discuss these items in more detail below.
Let's first discuss the determination of completeness which must happen within 28 days of applying for a permit. If you submit an application that is incomplete, the building department Is required to notify you of what is considered incomplete, so you can try again. During this review of completeness, the building department is not reviewing the accuracy or technical aspects of the project. They are merely reviewing the completeness of the documents to ensure they will have everything needed for them to do their job of checking the plans for compliance.
When you apply for a building permit, the building department will commonly have a checklist of what items are required to be submitted for review. Typically, these list the sort of drawings like floor plans and elevations needed, and they also list certain forms, calculations, and other documents that would ordinarily need to be submitted for that specific type of project. These are really straightforward. As an experienced architect, we are very accustomed to complying with these checklists, and we routinely submit permit applications that include all of these regular documents. From time to time, something out of the ordinary might be required such as a bald eagle report, archeological report, or some other oddball item that is uncommon. Historically, when that happens, the building department simply asks for that unusual document while they are in the midst of reviewing your plans. With the new legislation, this happens much differently.
This first step of “determination of completeness” has been used to corrupt the permit review process. Local building departments are using this step to delay the review of project applications. Because they have the ability to tell you that your project application is incomplete, they are using that power to stall the actual review of the plans. For example, If the building department is Running behind in reviews, They could simply kick out a project by telling an applicant that their submittal was incomplete. They can essentially invent items that need to be submitted such as ecology reports, soil studies, and other absurd requests that would normally not be required for a certain project type. We have even seen building departments say forms need to be signed by a different person, different forms need to be submitted, or numbers need to be changed from decimals to fraction to be deemed as “complete.” None of those examples are actually valid, but we have still seen local municipalities use that loophole. Once they tell you what is needed to make a “complete” application, then they “earn” another 14 days to determine if that additional information is considered “complete.” Once the application is deemed complete (or if they never respond to you), the clock starts for the actual review of the project (65 calendar days in most cases).
To demonstrate the most obscene example, we have seen a local government tell us additional information is still needed even after we did a pre-application conference with their staff to specifically define what drawings, forms, studies, etc would be needed for a complete application. We paid them over $4000 for that conference! Additionally, we also conducted a critical area determination (CAD) to verify which environmental concerns are valid for the property. Despite paying over $3000 for that procedure and over $4000 for the other one, the county still deemed the project as incomplete and requested additional items to be submitted even though we followed their initial requests with precision. This is either corruption or poor execution on their part. Either way, it’s not acceptable.
The review clock stops every time the building department tells you the application is incomplete, if you owe a fee, or if they ask you for additional information. This easily incentivizes building departments to charge more fees and to ask for more information. As you can see, these mechanisms cause the permit process to take longer since the additional (unsubstantiated) work causes the design and review processes to take longer.
There is another motivation for permit applications to be deemed incomplete. RCW 36.70B.160(1)(j) encourages local governments to have a “meeting with the applicant to attempt to resolve outstanding issues during the review process. The meeting must be scheduled within 14 days of a second request for corrections during permit review. If the meeting cannot resolve the issues and a local government proceeds with a third request for additional information or corrections, the local government must approve or deny the application upon receiving the additional information or corrections.” This means that if a local government gives you unclear or incomplete directives, you are likely to submit work that does not meet their needs. In that case, they can deny your application after the second attempt, and the clock totally resets!
The building department is only allowed to collect 80% of the permit fee initially, and the remaining 20% is only allowed to be collected if the review deadlines are met. Further, if a jurisdiction is late in their reviews to many times, they lose access to state funding. Consequently, local municipalities are even more incentivized to protect that funding by telling applicants their permit documents are incomplete or need additional information. The local building departments are spending significant resources on dedicating salaries to staff members to monitor these processes to ensure they do not lose their funding. Instead of paying more people to review more permit applications, they are paying more people to ensure they don’t lose access to their state grant money. The system is broken.
They don’t care about you. They care about their money. They may tell you otherwise, but don’t believe it. They have their own agenda. As an experienced local architect, a jurisdiction invited me to a local permitting education event where they explained to local citizens how “easy” and “simple”, and “fast” the permit process is. The process is quite the opposite. If it was so easy, they wouldn’t have needed to host an event like that! During that meeting, I grilled them with many of the points identified earlier, and they assured me they only want to help citizens and ensure their projects are safe and comply with the rules. This meeting was in a room with a posted sign that said “maximum occupancy: 22.” There were 26 - 32 people in the room during the course of the meeting. That does not demonstrate that they care about the safety of their citizens!
One positive that came out of this legislation is that many interior alteration projects are exempt from site plan review. For example, if you remodel the inside of your house without adding bedrooms, affecting the footprint of the home, or without triggering a requirement for fire sprinklers/access, then you don’t need to draw a site plan. This is huge since site plans are scrutinized for parking calculations, bike parking, setbacks, lot coverage calculations, and other regulations that have nothing to do with the inside of the house. Hint: if you are remodeling your house, ensure your total number of bedrooms stays the same! Every house can use more offices, dens, libraries, exercise rooms, art rooms, yoga rooms, prayer rooms … you get the idea.
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