Blog Post Title One

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in permit times over the last few years, even in places like Denver that had a well-functioning building department with true “walk-through” reviews.  While fixes are far from being implemented, the good news is that the City of Denver recognizes the issues. 

The city auditor conducted a full review of the residential permitting process in Denver, and issued 20 recommendations for the building department to implement (https://denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Auditors-Office/Audit-Services/Audit-Reports/Residential-Permitting).  The department did reject four of these, including hiring an administrator to monitor outside reviews and certain suggestions for ensuring that the database program works as intended.  Recommendations that are going to be implemented in 2024 include better training, written policies and procedures, and monitoring of policies and procedures.  All in all, we consider this a good start that will reduce permit review times if the department (and especially the to be announced new Executive Director of Community Planning and Development) is committed to the process. We are also hopeful that as Denver starts correcting the residential permitting issues the corrections will simultaneously reduce permit delays on commercial and tenant improvement permit processes.  One area of concern is the opposition to database cleanup from the city abates; future releases of the Blazener portal and software will allow us to monitor all comments from a permitting jurisdiction so that designers, architects, engineers and consultants can see what comments have been recently issued in a specific building or project type.  Our goal is to cut down on permit timing by allowing the project teams to design to what each city has been requiring (working through each city’s “gray” areas of the code).  While we can and are designing software to pull from any city’s database, the adage of “garbage in, garbage out” always applies.  Working will 3rd party government programs such as Denver’s Accela only provides good data for our clients if the departments understand how it works and input their review data correctly