Now It’s Up to the City Council : Mayor Riordan offers a strong proposal to cut red tape in building permits

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has launched a major initiative to undo the bureaucratic snarl that businesses and homeowners often encounter at City Hall when they apply for building permits. The very worthy goal is to cut the red tape that envelops the city’s arcane, costly and tortuous permitting process and makes adding a room to a home or constructing a commercial building an unpredictable and frustrating venture.

But the mayor cannot institute the needed changes all alone. The City Council is a necessary and vital player in making Los Angeles friendlier to and more accountable to residents and businesses, especially small businesses. The council ought to be quick to fall in line behind the mayor’s recommendations. There is wide consensus on the problem and solutions.

Riordan unveiled 66 recommendations last week for streamlining the permitting process. The sweeping proposals, which include scaling back fees, are similar to those presented in two recent independent studies, conducted by Progress L.A., a business group, and by a city-appointed committee headed by Dan Garcia, chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency. Those studies noted that the city bureaucracy had earned a reputation as one of the biggest obstacles to doing business in Los Angeles because of the capricious and arbitrary nature of its permitting process.

The mayor has already instituted half of his proposals by executive order. Those involve establishing new policies and guidelines that will enable the city to assign an employee as a “case manager” to a permit applicant to help him or her through the process, from the submission of plans through construction and final certification.

The mayor’s other proposals, including those that have to do with cutting fees and consolidating hearings, require action by the City Council. John Ferraro, council president, has formed a special six-member committee of council members to review the mayor’s proposals and make recommendations. Councilman Hal Bernson, a longtime critic of the permitting process, should be a forceful advocate.

The political tugs and shoves on council members on this issue will be varied. Homeowner groups may fear that the reforms will open their neighborhoods to all kinds of unwanted development, which is not the case. Streamlined and simplified city permitting would also eliminate the need for applicants to hire “expediters,” usually lawyers or lobbyists, who appeal to council members for help in getting their client’s project through the current process. Lastly, council members would lose some measure of the control they now enjoy over projects in their districts.

But depoliticization of the permitting process is long overdue. Council members should act swiftly on an issue that needs no further study.