Denver City Council has added more than $1.3 million to the city’s Community Planning & Development office for the 2016 budget year to help process a backlog of residential and commercial permit requests.

The additional funding from the city’s general fund, approved on the consent agenda on June 20 by city council, is meant to help alleviate wait times and the significant amount of overtime being worked by current staff in the department. By the end of 2015 there was an average wait time of 7 weeks for residential projects and a 6.2 week wait for commercial projects, well above the standard of 4 weeks and 2 weeks respectively.

The supplemental funding will go to limited and on-call positions to help organize, inspect and review the influx of permit requests hitting Denver during the summer months, said Andrea Burns, communications director for the planning and development office. Currently the department is on pace to hit almost $1 million in overtime for 2016, a pace that is untenable for employees trying to cut wait times.

“This is not a list of new full-time employees. This is more of a stop-gap measure or a little shot in the arm for the department based on the volumes we’re seeing midyear,” Burns said.The impact of the additional money should start to be felt by August after the department has gone through its hiring and training process, Burns said. The permit numbers for both residential and commercial represent major projects and not simple over-the-counter permits for things like a new fence.

“The first notable impact from the approved budget supplement will be on single-family and duplex projects. We will begin sending more projects to third-party reviewers at SAFEbuilt (a private company that works with local governments on construction and inspection) at a time than we’ve been able to send them thus far,” Burns said. “We expect this will reduce the average turnaround time for residential review projects to 3 weeks.”

The issue with wait times is in part due to a successful economy in Denver. Permit request for both residential and commercial are expected to be up about 8 percent over 2015. In 2015 the city saw 75,717 permit requests for major commercial and residential projects which was an 8.8-percent increase over 2014.Given the fact that the city in the early 2000s combined several permits into one, Burns said the city has seen the highest volume of requests in its history, even though 2015’s number is below 1999’s numbers by several thousand permits. The permitting in 2015 represented about $3.6 billion in evaluation of material and labor, a substantial increase over 2014’s $2.4 billion in evaluation for permitted projects.

“We really aren’t seeing outliers or increases in only one area. It really is a rising tide of construction in Denver,” Burns said. “It has definitely been a steady rise. And given that our staffing numbers were down during the recession and post recession, it’s been a challenge to catch those numbers back up so that we’re keeping pace with the rising demands.”

Along with the influx of limited and on-call staff, Burns said the department has worked to streamline the permitting process by utilizing technology while at the same time making sure to keep a strict standard for safety inspections.

“We’re just trying to make business process improvements across the board so that things are more clear and are simpler for customers to understand and to get through the process more quickly,” Burns said.

– ramsey@coloradostatesman.com