Anything but This : Riordan’s Plan to Simplify Permit Process Gets Support From Wait-Weary Builders

Curtis the homeless veteran divides his workday fairly equally among the buildings at the Government Center in Van Nuys--with the exception of the Department of Building and Safety, which he shuns as the palace of bad vibes.

Folks coming out of that place just do not seem to be in a particularly generous mood, Curtis observes. Most of them are too stony-faced and grim to part with spare change.

Curtis, a gray-bearded panhandler with a bedroll of faded blue that matches his eyes, knows nothing of the plan that Mayor Richard Riordan announced a week ago to slash red tape in the city’s notoriously bureaucratic building permit process. But if that plan would leave visitors to the Building and Safety office in a more relaxed, more charitable frame of mind, he’s all for it.

Most of the weary-eyed, briefcase-toting builders and would-be builders at the office one recent day were for it as well.

Most of them knew nothing of the mayor’s 66-point plan either--and with good reason: They had spent the previous five hours in line. And after waiting day after day, receiving two or three contradictory answers to a single question, they agreed that they were ready for anything--anything but this.

Some even offered a simple one-point plan.

“Common sense,” said the 74-year-old co-owner of an Orange County sign company, asking to be identified only as Martin. “They just don’t use it sometimes.”

Nestled between the public library and the Criminal Courts Building, bathed in fluorescent light and suffering its own ailments--sagging, rain-soaked ceilings, cracked paint--the Building and Safety office is a gathering place of the reluctant, confronting the obdurate, plodding through the endless.

Those who know, those who have been here before, come prepared.

*

Take Martin’s briefcase, which exemplifies the permit-seeker’s survival needs: rulers, compasses, protractors, architectural drawings, notarized copies of official-looking papers, a crossword puzzle and a can of flat, warm Coke.

It is now after 2 p.m. and Martin has been here, off and on, since 7:30 a.m. “I once read 351 pages in a book” while waiting, he said. “The book was called ‘In the Interest of Justice.’ ”

Martin is seeking approval to replace the sign at a Ventura Boulevard shop he represents. As he tells it, his day has gone something like this:

The first employee he spoke with said he needed photographs and dimensions of not only the sign being replaced, but of all the signs on all the stores in the mini-mall where the business is located. So Martin dragged out a tape measure and camera and spent the next two hours measuring and photographing.

When he returned, the first employee was at lunch.

“So, I went to this young man,” Martin said, pointing at a bespectacled clerk. “And he said, ‘You didn’t have to do all that.’ ”

On to the planning office for a required stamp of approval. Stamp price: $356. But all the employees were out somewhere, Martin said, so he was left to wait an hour and a half before getting his stamp.

Then he returned here, put his name on the waiting list, and was now . . . waiting.

According to the study that spurred the mayor to action, it can take Los Angeles residents 22 times as long as those in nearby cities to get a building permit. The authors of the study, a private group named Progress L.A., suggested 83 measures to streamline the system. The 66 Riordan chose 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 onset what an applicant will be required to do.

Reform would be fine with builder Paul Nagel, who just wants to replace aluminum-framed windows with wood-framed ones for a family whose home was battered by the Northridge earthquake.

“I’m having a bad day,” Nagel said with a wan half-smile as he passed the four-hour mark. “They’re out to get me.

“I’ll give it till 3,” he added, massaging his temples. “Well, maybe 3:30.”

By 3:30, Nagel is done, and hurries out the door, passing Curtis the panhandler. Curtis takes a long, contented drag on a bummed cigarette and says he is about to head over to the county library, where the most generous people can be found. He can study existentialism most of the rest of the day there and still round up a pocketful of change.

And the Building and Safety office? Well, even though Curtis won’t set foot there, he figures it just can’t be as depressing as the faces of the people who pass through it. You want depressing, he says, try Sartre or Nietzsche.