What took months to complete now takes days.
That’s the key message the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting relayed this week with regard to its infamous backlog of city-issued residential and commercial building permits.
Excluding instant online reviews, DPP said its residential code review — deemed an important part of the city’s overall building permit process — as recently as May took six months or longer to complete.
As of Nov. 1 that review time fell to an average of nine days, DPP said.
And when DPP factors in the time it takes to pre-screen and approve issuance of a residential building permit, on average it takes 11 days.
“And people are probably asking, Does that mean if I put in my residential permit today, I’m going to get it in 11 days?” DPP Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna told the City Council’s Committee on Planning and the Economy on Thursday. “No, you will not.”
“But this was a major part of our backlog, and people were complaining, ‘Why was my application sitting in there for six months just for the residential code review?’ But we’ve been able to manage that,” she added.
DPP claims other wait times fell as well.
That includes a drop in the time a permit application spends under commercial code review — going from an average of at least nine months, according to city data from May, to an average of about two months, or a total average time of 63 days, as of Nov. 21.
“And again, does that mean you’re going to get your commercial permit in 63 days? No, but this is a major reduction in just the commercial code review,” she said.
At the meeting, Takeuchi Apuna pointed to a line graph showing DPP’s historical building permit backlogs from 2010 to this year.
“The last time we shared this, it was maybe a few months ago, the backlog was still coming down,” she said of the graph’s information. “But the end of the line … was above 10,000 (permit applications), and now we’re below 10,000.”
She added that the city’s “major backlog” was based on various factors.
“Whether it was a lot of new regulations that were placed on building permits, there was COVID, we had the federal indictments (of former DPP officials), we had auditing going on,” she said. “And also, in 2023 we had a very large spike in building permit applications.”
In that year, she noted, DPP handled 20,000 building permit applications.
“Prior to that, in the last few years, the average was between (16,000) and 18,000 applications,” Takeuchi Apuna said. “So 2023 was just a year of a lot of applications.”
By the end of 2024, “we’re on track to maybe be under that, around 16,000 or so applications,” she said.
During the code review process for residential and commercial applications, DPP noted that examiners review for compliance with applicable development codes and ordinances before routing permit applications for review by other agencies — including stormwater quality and Honolulu Fire Department fire code inspections — as part of the overall approval process.
DPP said it was working on improving stormwater quality review times, which typically takes about a month to complete — adding to the overall length of time it takes for the department to issue a permit.
However, Takeuchi Apuna asserted not all permit delays are created by her department, noting building permit applicants themselves — or their “design professionals” — might also slow the process.
“We know that there’s much that can be done on the applicants’ side to help move your permit through the process,” she said.
If DPP issues corrections on a building permit application and goes back to an applicant, she said further delays can occur — ones that usually result in a “subsequent review cycle.”
“So you’re multiplying the amount of time that you’re going through the permit process, if your design professional is unable to make the corrections that are required by DPP and all these other agencies,” she added. “So, on average, applicants go through maybe one to three review cycles — one, obviously, being the best.”
“And then we have some that are four or more review cycles,” she said. “And that’s when you get a little concerned, and that’s when you might want to question your design professional.”
Staying involved in the permit process can help, she said.
And, according to DPP, an important upgrade to the department’s ePlans — or electronic plans submission software, under the ProjectDox system — allows applicants to become “project team members.”
Applicants and property owners are now able to log on to the city’s ePlans system and identify where their permit is in the review process.
On that site they may also view DPP comments that need to be addressed.
“So just the quality of plans coming in, and responsiveness to any comments and corrections, and the completeness of the plans are very important,” she said. “You don’t want your design professional putting in plans that are only 80% or 50% done.
“You want 100% so that DPP,” she added, “and the other agencies can go through it (and) make their comments on a complete project and hopefully get everything right and issue the permit.”
At the end of her presentation, Takeuchi Apuna and her department received a brief round of applause from the Council’s planning committee.
“We’re going to be coming over to DPP to personally thank a lot of the staff who played a big role in this,” Esther Kia‘aina, the committee’s chair, said afterward.
Later, Council member Val Okimoto asked a clarifying question over what DPP’s numbers really meant with regard to someone actually receiving a building permit on a timely basis.
“So for a typical single-family building permit, it’s going to take nine days, on average, for the residential code portion of the building permit review,” Takeuchi Apuna replied. “But then there’s other reviews, whether it’s the stormwater quality or HFD; it just depends on the project scope and what the requirements are (for the review).”
“So you would have nine days on average, but then you tack on stormwater quality, which might be three weeks, and HFD, which might be a week,” she said. “So it extends out to whatever that it is, depending on those reviews.”
“But the residential code review in itself was like the longest wait,” she added, “but we’ve brought it down.”
No one from the public spoke at the meeting on this information-only item.
