Push on to speed permitting

Diego Luis Perez, co-owner of Flan Y Ajo restaurant on Westminster Street in Providence, wanted to open a wine bar.
He lined up a liquor license and a vacant space on Union Street that, at 450 square feet, was even tinier than his popular tapas bar. Having been through the permitting process for Flan Y Ajo, Perez thought he knew what to expect from city officials and that such a small, innocuous establishment would be easy to get approved.
It wasn’t. Recent changes to plumbing guidelines put his plans at odds with the state building code and his quest for an occupancy permit would take five months, cost approximately $2,000 and force him to become reacquainted with a typewriter. “It was bizarre and frustrating, but it’s over now, hopefully,” Perez said a week after the Zoning Board of Review had granted a variance clearing the way for a permit.
He hopes to open the wine bar, Bodega Malasana, by the end of November. But as frustrating as his experience with red tape was, others who have tried to open new businesses would say Perez got off easy. Many projects have to wait far longer than five months for a green light and some never get one.
Business-owner frustration with building codes, land-use rules and a myriad of other regulations is hardly new and hardly exclusive to Providence or Rhode Island.
But the challenge of opening such a small establishment in an existing space highlights how imposing a task streamlining the regulatory process is.
With jobs, construction and commercial tax revenue at a premium since the recession, state and local officials throughout Rhode Island have promoted new efforts to make it easier to start a business.
With the help of IBM consultants who studied the city as part of the “Smarter Cities” program, Providence launched an initiative to streamline its permitting land-management systems. It included the creation of a new committee headed by city Director of Administration Michael D’Amico and members of the development community to keep pushing for efficiency.
And the General Assembly passed legislation requiring all state regulatory entities to examine the cost and impact of each regulation on their books, identifying any that could be trimmed or eliminated, within four years. Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee in September accelerated the time frame of the review to two years.
By the end of the year, city officials expect to show tangible results from their effort, starting with a new digital permitting system.
“We are trying to make it so we are the fastest in the country,” said Providence Economic Development Director Jim Bennett in response to complaints from business owners like Perez about permitting.
To get there, the city not only has centralized its permitting offices but is working to rehire some of the manpower it lost during the recession.
In many cities across the country, the downturn sparked a vicious regulatory cycle. Budget cuts slowed down permitting, which made new-business formation slower and more costly, which discouraged investment, stifling economic activity, reducing the revenue that feeds the budget.
Providence saw its pre-recession plan-review staff of five drop down to two, but Bennett said the city has budgeted to restore those lost positions this year.
The new electronic-permitting system should make more efficient use of those workers, allowing inspectors to access and file information remotely while businesses with new projects will be able to submit their applications online.
That should eliminate the need to fill out paper forms, which can’t be handwritten, and force applicants to either scan them into a computer or find a typewriter.
Inspectors will also be outfitted with tablet computers so they can receive detailed information about each property and submit their findings and photographs from the field, cutting more time out of the process.
As important as untangling red tape, permitting reformers say, is making it predictable, so applicants, for better or worse, know exactly what they are getting into when they start a project.
To do that, permitting authorities need to know how long it’s taking to move applications through the system and be able to track where the bottlenecks are.
Despite the efforts of this year, Providence still isn’t able to do that yet, said Director of Inspection and Standards Jeff Lykins.
“There is a back and forth process with the designer,” he said. “We find violations and then they have to go back and correct them, which slows everything down.” Once the permitting system goes digital, Lykins said his department and the public should be able to track what happens to each application once it is filed and see how the system is performing.
Lykins said the new electronic permitting system should be ready to launch before the end of November.
In the case of Bodega Malasana, the permitting process became complicated because the plumbing code now requires any eating-drinking establishment occupied by 15 or more people to have two wheelchair-accessible bathrooms.
Like many other businesses located in small urban spaces built long before these requirements existed, the plumbing code would have taken up much of the wine bar’s space with restrooms.
New businesses being opened in the compact spaces on the first floor of the Biltmore Garage on Washington Street have also run into the bathroom problem, as has architect Steve Durkee, who is opening a bar on Eddy Street and needed four months to get a variance.
In the best-case scenario, projects that need a variance can get a hearing with the Zoning Board within a month, but often the monthly agenda is full and applicants have to wait.
While cities and towns enforce building, fire and plumbing codes, the codes themselves are set on the state level, usually based on national standards.
In Rhode Island, regulators have scrutinized and submitted recommendations for 151 of the 1,638 state regulations mandated for review under this year’s legislation, said Leslie Taito, director of regulatory and quality management at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
These regulations include everything from environmental rules to professional licensing.
Back on the construction side, the state fire marshal and building inspector are working on a state e-permitting system similar to what Providence is set to launch and what communities such as North Kingstown and East Providence are putting together.
On the EDC board of directors, Karl Wadensten has led the push to cut state red tape.
“You have to train people to look at regulations and ask: do they have a clear and predictable outcome and purpose?” he said. •

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