Department of Planning and Permitting outlines improvements to residential, commercial building permit review times
Released on Thursday, November 21, 2024 by Curtis Lum
HONOLULU – The City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) announced Thursday, during a presentation to the Honolulu City Council’s Committee on Planning and the Economy, that it has made significant improvements in reducing the time it takes the department to review residential and commercial building permit applications.
Acknowledging that there is still room for the department to improve on overall permitting times, Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna informed the committee during Thursday’s presentation that residential code review times – an important element of the overall permitting process – had fallen to an average of nine days. Historical data provided by DPP during the presentation showed that the same part of the permitting process took six months or more as recently as May 2024.
“This is a major step forward for DPP, but we are not done. We continue to streamline and improve the process through management solutions, adding capacity and upgrading our technology, with the goal of providing the highest level of customer service,” said DPP Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna. “We are not just working to come out from under a permitting backlog — we are trying to stand at the forefront of building permit processing innovation and efficiency. “
Similarly, the average amount of time a permit application spends under commercial code review has dropped from an average of at least nine months (according to data from May 2024) to an average of roughly 60 days, as of November 2024.
During the code review process for residential and commercial applications, examiners review for compliance with applicable development codes and ordinances before routing permit applications for review by other agencies — including Storm Water Quality (SWQ) and fire code inspections — as part of the overall approval process. During Thursday’s committee presentation, DPP announced they were still working on improving Storm Water Quality review times, which typically take approximately one month to complete — adding time to the overall length of time it takes for the department to issue a permit.
“While we are happy with our progress with the time it takes for core plan review, we know that there are still many areas of the process that we can improve, including the time it takes our Storm Water Quality branch to review applications,” said Takeuchi Apuna. “Our team is focused on improving all aspects of the permitting process, and we are excited for the challenges that still lie ahead.”
While DPP works to make meaningful change to the permitting process, customers and their design professionals play an important role in determining the speed with which their projects move through the system.
A recent key upgrade to DPP’s ePlans (electronic plans) submission software, under the ProjectDox system, allows applicants to become “project team members,” allowing applicants and property owners to directly track the status of their permit application. Applicants and property owners are now able to log on to the ePlans system and identify where their permit is in the review process and view the comments that need to be addressed by their design professional. Knowing what needs to happen next with their building permit application can help move it forward more efficiently.
Additionally, a critical part of the permit review process is the submission of quality plans by the applicant’s design professional. High quality and complete plans can be approved in one review cycle, while poor quality or incomplete plans will be subject to additional review cycles — each of which multiply the length of the review times.
DPP is urging all customers to become a “project team member” in ePlans and reminding them to be vigilant about checking the status of — and comments on — their building permit applications. By knowing the status of their applications, they can talk to their design professional about what still needs to be done to move their permit application forward.
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