Faced with a crippling housing crisis and an increased demand for housing, one city department could be at the center of development: the permitting office.
Syracuse’s Central Permit Office, which greenlights new developments within the city, has been criticized in recent years by housing advocates and developers — often on opposing sides when it comes to housing issues — for being inefficient. Those problems, developers have said, create delays in the approval of commercial developments that could provide more housing.
Mayor Ben Walsh’s administration has spent much of his two terms trying to clean up the permitting office. The city has rolled out a third-party plan review system — a program in which contracted firms review developers’ plans to pick up the slack of an understaffed permit office. The city’s permit office last year approved $413.5 million worth of construction, the most construction ever approved by the office.
However, the permitting office — and that plan — is now the subject of cuts proposed by the Syracuse Common Council.
The proposed cuts prompted 39 advocates to write a letter to Walsh urging the mayor to veto cuts to the Division of Code Enforcement, which includes the permit office. Walsh has for now vetoed the cuts to the code enforcement and permit budgets, but the council on Tuesday could reinstate the cuts.
Councilor Corey Williams, the chair of the Finance, Taxation and Assessment Committee has said the city could come back to the council to ask for more funding if the program works and runs out of money.
Walsh, however, contends the program should be fully funded to start the year. City officials this year transferred money to code enforcement because of the success of the piloted version of the program.
“The Common Council has approved our contracts with those vendors. This isn’t something we changed overnight. We’ve been building toward this,” Walsh said. “We piloted it out. It worked out.”
What it takes to get a permit
The permit office handles 4,000 to 5,000 permit requests each year, ranging from applications for small-scale renovations to large commercial developments that require major construction.
In 2024, the city permitted 41 new residential buildings, creating 304 units across residential and commercial housing, a considerable increase from the 41 units that came from the 18 approved permits in 2023. Each permit approval requires a series of reviews and departments to pass, depending on the size and scope of the project.
In the initial review, what the city calls the pre-development meeting, the applicant will meet with anywhere from three to ten city officials from:
- Code enforcement
- The fire department
- Engineering
- Water
- Three Department of Public Works divisions, including sewers, transportation and storm water
- Zoning
- Police
- Planning
Jake Dishaw, the city’s deputy commissioner of code enforcement and once the permit office’s director, said they have worked to expedite small-scale permit approval, starting with the pre-development meeting where city officials review logistics and ensure applicants are aware of the paperwork they need.
A new residential permit can get approved in four weeks, according to Dishaw.
Large commercial buildings require more planning. If a developer were to propose building a large commercial or residential building, it triggers a major site plan review. That includes a land use review, a construction plan review, zoning approval, and a public comment period advertised ten days in advance. This is a 16-week process, according to Dishaw.
“It’s a little difficult to expedite that,” Dishaw said.
What have the issues with permitting been?
The permit office has received a litany of complaints, many that predate the Walsh administration. Namely that the office’s documents are not yet fully digitized and the office’s lack of structure.
These faults are what is slowing down the permitting process, said city Auditor Alex Marion, who performed an audit of the permit office.
Compounding these issues is that the office only has one commercial plan reviewer. The office is trying to find more full-time plan reviewers.
“It’s highly technical, highly skilled work that requires experience and state certification,” Dishaw said. “And we just don’t have the internal capacity to move everything as fast as we’d like.”
Developers in 2018 sent a letter to Walsh’s administration outlining issues with the permitting process. Marion, in the 2024 audit, and the developers agreed that the permitting office as structured is decentralized.
“There’s no one who is in a position right now to compel everyone to be on the same page and get things done in an expedited fashion,” Marion, the city auditor, said. “This is a structural issue rather than a personality issue.”
In the 2018 letter, developers wrote that the system of passing plans through multiple departments is “perceived to lack transparency and accountability.”
Dishaw, who disagrees that the office is decentralized, said each application has a dedicated project manager to shepherd the process.
“Departments have assigned reviewers that report to their respective department heads, but the Central Permit Office oversees the process with Project Managers that are based in the permit office,” Dishaw said in an email.
The permit office is in the process of trying to overhaul and digitize its system.
How third-party plan review factors in
The city has touted third-party plan review as one way to move projects through the development pipeline faster.
A small group of developers proposed third-party plan review in the 2018 letter to the city, which Central Current obtained. It was listed as a recommendation to streamline the permit process.
The city last year allocated $150,000 for the permit office to contract with a small number of approved third-party firms: CS Engineering Elevator Inspections, C&S Companies, CHA Consulting, DALPOS Architects & Integrations, LaBella Associates, and SAFEBuilt.
Which firm is assigned a plan review depends on the size and scope of the project, the type of project, the permit office’s internal capacity, an applicant request to be reviewed by a contractor and cost of construction, Dishaw said.
Melissa Zell, the president and chief operating officer of Pioneer Development, was among the people listed on the 2018 letter to the mayor. Zell said she’s hoping to see third-party plan review help push development along.
“They finally got some real action, and they’ve got approved vendors and the system is pretty much up and ready to go. And I’m just dying to see it make some positive impacts,” Zell said.
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