There was some good news from the long-troubled Dallas permitting office recently. Every step of improvement there is worth noting, and just as we criticized the failures, we are ready to celebrate signs of success.
A city memo from Nov. 1 said the Planning and Development Department has cut the time it takes to issue commercial construction permits in half. It used to take more than 300 days. In October, it was down to 122.
The department has also resolved half of the 9,800-case backlog of stale or inactive permits.
We’ve heard from too many developers over the last few years that it’s too hard to build in Dallas. Suburbs are attracting homes and businesses away from the core city, partly because permitting is easier there.
Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert has pushed resources toward the problem. This summer, she combined two departments with responsibilities related to planning and development in an effort to streamline operations. She also launched a public dashboard to track commercial permitting metrics and make that information easily accessible to the public. Now, she has commissioned Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley to pull together a team of representatives from various city departments, working with a contractor, to shorten wait times.
“The goal of this work is to reduce the number of days it takes to issue commercial permits, improve process efficiency, and enhance the customer experience,” Bentley wrote in the memo.
Two days before, Tolbert said, “As a city, we needed to learn how to be more customer-centric.”
That’s the right message, and this seems like the right way to get there.
It’s too early to declare victory, though. The Nov. 1 report dealt only with October’s data. The trendline over the past few months has been erratic, not steadily improving as we’d like to see. The average wait time for commercial permits issued in September was a whopping 827 days.
It remains to be seen if this is a fluke or the beginning of real change, but this is a positive move. Builders will be glad to see progress, as will the people who some day live, work or shop in the places they build. Dallas was once a “can-do” city resolved to keep the dirt flying. We won’t get back to that growth without a similar “can-do” attitude on Marilla Street.
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