Issuing building and licensing permits is the real meat-and-potatoes economic development work of the city.
It opens the doors, literally, for businesses to get going. It affects every business that sets up in the city, yanking on the pocketbooks of entrepreneurs in a personal painful way.
Unfortunately, the process is institutionally corrupted by job protection, the city's monopoly on fees and approvals and customer fear. It amounts to a virtual extortion ring wrapped in a conspiracy of silence. Does it really cost $14,000 to connect street sewer and water pipes to a property line? Only the city knows. Just pay up and shut up.
This isn't to say that the vast majority of city staff aren't decent hard-working people, just that the incentives for putting customer needs last and for council to cut these low-visibility staff positions first are ever-present.
One veteran contractor said: "People don't understand how frustrating it is to get things approved. You have to have the patience of a saint."
Here are a few illustrations:
The rapid permit queue-jumping extortion game: "We were told to apply for a building permit [$1,300 cost] for our small business site renovation and that it would take six weeks," said a first-time small business owner.
"For the eight hours work involved, we could pay $250 per hour for someone's "overtime" to get the permit faster. We needed to get revenue flowing, so we said yes.
"We paid an extra $1,904 to make this a priority, but sometimes it has taken two days to get an answer from the person specifically assigned to our case."
The Tuesday morning staff meeting: "We started lining up before 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Out of eight application desks, one person was served before 9 a.m., when everything shut down for an hour while the staff had a meeting. People who lined up at 8:20 didn't start getting served until 10:30."
The sprinkler permit runaround: "At the permit desk, one staff person said we could now start demolitions. Another person at the same time and place said no, we needed a sprinkler permit first.
"We went outside and saw a building inspector and asked him. First he says no you don't need it, then yes you do. So we went back in and got the sprinkler inspector's phone number. He called back the next morning to say we only need a sprinkler inspection later.
"Two days later we got a call from city hall saying they're sending down a sprinkler inspector. So we stop the demo. The sprinkler inspector shows up (for which we pay $400) and says he doesn't know why he's inspecting at this stage. Apparently the city has changed the rules and hasn't told its four sprinkler inspectors."
The mobile intermunicipal business licence: "We hired my brother, an electrician from Surrey, but he can't apply for a permit in Vancouver because he doesn't have a Vancouver business licence," said a homeowner. "So we have to hire a second electrician just to get the permit."
Several metro regions in B.C. have successfully merged business licences, so tradespeople with a licence in one jurisdiction can work in a neighbouring jurisdiction without multiple business licences. Not so Vancouver. I was pushing for this when I was a councillor at least seven years ago. The Vancouver Board of Trade is calling for it today. The bureaucracy has been resisting. Councillor Geoff Meggs passed a similar motion in January. Check back in another seven years.
While the city deserves credit for cutting processing times in half for most single-family construction permits in 2012, ongoing council-directed budget cuts have badly eroded levels of service in this department.
The green glory stuff is great, but these bread and butter services have far more impact on the economic life of the city. Solving this starts with the city manager accepting that these issues really matter. •
