Building Permit Process Targeted : Development: Mayor presents a sweeping package to overhaul the city’s arcane system for getting approval to build or remodel.

That long-ago morning in June, 1988, when the St. Barnabas Senior Center opened its brand-new building near MacArthur Park was a happy one--until a city building inspector showed up with an order to close down and perform additional construction work.

“We did everything by the book, and we had our certificate of occupancy; (we) canceled our lease on the building we were renting and moved over the weekend,” recalled the Rev. Richard Hall, the center’s executive director. He said the extra work cost $225,000, the amount it takes to run the center’s day-care program for people with Alzheimer’s disease for a year.

On Monday, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan chose the center as the site for announcing a sweeping package of measures to overhaul the city’s arcane development process. Echoing findings of a recent business group report and a city-appointed committee that studied the system, Riordan said that getting permission to build or remodel in Los Angeles is costly, time-consuming and filled with uncertainties and arbitrary decisions.

“Next to public safety, nothing is more important for our city,” said Riordan, elected in 1993 on a platform that included making City Hall more efficient and friendlier to business. “We lose jobs and city revenue every time our Byzantine system claims another victim or scares away a potential applicant.”

Riordan’s proposals include assigning an employee to each permit applicant, examining the city’s rapidly rising fees, waiving fees for projects deemed to have public benefit and making it clear from the outset what an applicant will be required to do. Other recommendations include shortening the length of time required to obtain permits and eliminating the duplicative inspections by the Building and Safety and Fire departments, which often produce conflicting orders.

About half the 66 measures Riordan called for can be ordered with the stroke of the mayor’s pen, but others will require consent from the City Council.

The mayor’s office estimated that the reforms would cost $10 million, including retraining city employees and computerizing fee information and other requirements. It will seek $4 million toward the overhaul in the coming fiscal year.

Some of the reforms could be in place as early as May, but others, including those that require council approval, probably could not take effect before the end of the year, officials acknowledged.

Council President John Ferraro responded to the mayor’s proposals by appointing a special six-member committee of council members to review the proposals and make recommendations. The committee includes Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the Planning and Land Use Committee and a longtime advocate of streamlining the development process.

“We’re ready to take this red tape off City Hall,” said Bernson, who joined Riordan at the senior center news conference. He referred to a model of the Downtown landmark, which the mayor’s staff had swathed in red crepe-paper streamers to illustrate the point for the cameras.

Sensitive to criticisms from influential homeowner groups concerned that the reforms will open their neighborhoods to the kinds of development they have long fought, the mayor focused on the “victims” of a bureaucracy run amok.

About 20 people with development nightmares to tell joined Riordan at the senior center. There was Elliot Klein, whose permit to remodel his Hollywood Hills home got held up by city officials who claimed his street did not exist. There was Westchester businessman Jim Sullivan, who was ordered by a city inspector to cut down some of the trees another city employee had required him to plant.

And there was Jerry Sherman, a partner in a Sherman Oaks architectural and development firm, who went through a five-month delay because the city insisted on a public hearing for his Pacific Palisades apartment project, even though it met all the codes and zoning laws.

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Riordan said the system most hurts the small business proprietor and the homeowner because they cannot afford to hire professionals to help them through the system.

“We’re going to put a lot of expediters and lobbyists out of business,” Riordan said.

But many of those same lobbyists are a source of campaign contributions for council members. In addition, council members now enjoy strong say in many of the projects proposed for their districts, and they may not all be eager to give up some of their authority.

Although homeowner groups are expected to fight some of the overhaul proposals, Dan Garcia, president of the committee that formed the framework for Riordan’s recommendations, has predicted that the council itself, along with an entrenched bureaucracy, may pose the bigger obstacles.

Times staff writer Hugo Martin contributed to this story.

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The 66-Part Plan At first blush, a bureaucracy-reform package that has 66 components may seem a tad bureaucratic itself, but supporters of the overhaul plan would say that just goes to show how unnecessarily complicated Los Angeles’ building and development system has become. Here are some examples of the suggested solutions, and who can implement them.

WHAT’S UP TO THE MAYOR * NEW SYSTEM: Create a “case management” system within the Department of Building and Safety so each building permit applicant will have an employee to guide him or her through the process, from submitting plans through construction and city certification of the finished project.

* HANDBOOK: Help the Planning Department write a handbook to guide applicants through such things as permit requirements, zoning changes and conditional use permits.

* WORK EVALUATION: Have the Personnel Department establish standards for judging the work of employees involved in development, perhaps by having permit applicants evaluate them.

* DUPLICATION LIMITS: Direct Building and Safety to work with the Fire Department to eliminate duplicate plan-checking and inspections.

WHAT’S UP TO THE CITY COUNCIL * CONTROLLED FEES: Freeze development fees on a given project once an application has been submitted.

* HEARINGS: Consolidate into one session the several public hearings currently required for some projects.

* FEE REVIEW: Establish a committee to review development fees, which have been increasing sharply in the last few years.

* LOWER FEES: Waive fees for projects considered to be of public benefit.