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As a reporter for Civil Beat, I’ve written about Honolulu’s troubled permitting department for years, chronicling the trajectory of ballooning delays and the fallout of federal bribery cases.

With applicants waiting months or years for even simple building permits, the Department of Planning and Permitting has become a target of island residents’ ire and ridicule. As we close out 2024, we thought it was time to reflect on how DPP got in such bad shape and highlight some encouraging signs of progress. 

In my conversations with permit seekers, people have described DPP as the epitome of “government at work” — a bureaucracy intent on nitpicking residents down to the most manini detail while turning a blind eye to the worst offenders, all while failing to keep its own house in order. (If you recall, five former employees were sent to prison for accepting bribes.) 

At our this year, one resident who’d had two kids since submitting her application said “it’s easier to grow two humans than it is to get a building permit!”

That kind of frustration is why Civil Beat focused on the permitting delays over the last year. And after many interviews with applicants and city officials, digging into permitting data and analyzing public records, I’ve learned that the system was indeed broken.

But it’s also true that amid all the public scrutiny, the city seems to be making a good faith effort to fix it.

The department that it reduced its residential code review time from six months to nine days. Commercial code review time went from six months to two, according to city data.

Those reviews account for just part of the permitting process — delays persist elsewhere in a permitʻs journey from application to final approval — and DPP’s data is far from perfect.

Still, those reductions represent substantial headway. And it’s not just the department’s own numbers. Some of DPP’s most frequent customers have told me they’re seeing at least some of their applications move faster than before.

“My feeling is that things are moving a bit more quickly,” Jayna Yeager, owner of the permit routing service Oʻahu Permits, said.

Yeager cautioned though that it depends on which plans checker is assigned to her application and whether the project requires a review by a division that is still backlogged, like stormwater.

“We still have a ways to go, but we definitely look back and can be like, look, we’ve come this far,” Planning and Permitting Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna said. “I feel like we’re halfway there. In this next half, the momentum is going to build. Already, we can feel it.” 

Permit Pileup

In this ongoing series about Honolulu’s notoriously troubled permitting department, we seek to explain the failures, inequities and inefficiencies in Oahu’s permitting process and explore solutions that would make the system work better for everyone.

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How The Problem Reached Crisis Levels

Oʻahu residents have complained about DPP delays for years, but permitting times got really bad in 2022.

At the end of that year, DPP was taking an average of more than 10 and 14 months for residential and commercial plans, respectively, plus additional time for water, fire and historic preservation reviews and time the applicant spent responding to DPP’s comments.

The glacial pace was frustrating property owners, putting a drag on the construction industry and slowing homebuilding in a market already starved for housing.

In DPP’s telling, the delays were caused by a confluence of factors. Over several mayoral administrations, permits were funneled into a single chokepoint: a severely understaffed and poorly trained office trying to keep up with the rapidly evolving building code while using obsolete technology. 

Exhibit A: To run paper around the office, they were using pneumatic tubes (think cylinders that are vacuum-sucked through pipes). It was cutting edge technology … in the 19th century.

Understaffing at the department, which pays entry-level plans reviewers about $40,000 a year, was exacerbated when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. As of earlier this year, the department had a 24% vacancy rate. Now, the department reports only one vacancy among the ranks of its integral residential plan reviewers.

Beyond the problem of delays, the system has been spitting out wildly disparate results, with some applicants waiting seemingly forever while others moved relatively quickly, according to our analysis of DPP’s data. Those inconsistencies contributed to the public perception that DPP was fundamentally unfair.

Then came the federal bribery indictments of five staffers and a local architect in March 2021. The remaining employees were scared of being accused of favoritism and insisted on answering applicant questions in the order they were received, according to the director. Applicants were sent to the back of the line and had to wait weeks or months every time they had a question or comment, no matter how small. This made the department’s backlog even worse, Takeuchi Apuna said.

A wave of solar permits, pandemic gathering restrictions and the transition to an electronic system called ePlans were additional bumps in the road. Civil Beat described all the details in this story: “Honolulu’s Building Permit Delays: A ‘Nightmare’ Decades In The Making.”

The delays have been painful. I’ve spoken to a man who cleared his home of furniture in anticipation of his permit only to sleep on an air mattress in his living room for three years. The owners of small businesses, like Soderholm Bus and Mobility, have had to endure burdensome holding costs as they wait for the city’s approval to grow their operations.

Some people are so turned off by the system that they don’t bother with it at all. A recent Civil Beat investigation found the stars of the HGTV homeflipping show Renovation Aloha were transforming derelict properties into million-dollar listings without permits.

And Christina Takahashi, owner of Lava Day Spa, told me last year she wanted to expand her business to waxing, but getting the county’s OK to construct private rooms was too daunting.

“I don’t know if I want to go through that,” she said.

The holdups have also impacted city revenue. The longer projects take to be built, the longer the city has to wait to tax them.

Signs Of Hope

Since taking over the department in 2022, Takeuchi Apuna has rolled out a number of initiatives to bring permit wait times down.

She instituted a quota of six plans per day for code reviewers, allowed for overtime, and hired contract workers to help.

The director also advised employees that they won’t be accused of wrongdoing if they address low-hanging fruit outside the order in which it was received. If an applicant has a quick question about the code or fixed a minor mistake on their plans, Takeuchi Apuna said DPP reviewers should get those tasks out of the way.

“As long as you’re fair and you do it across the board, it’s not a problem,” she said. “You’re not favoring one over the other. We’re just trying to be more productive.”

Technology has helped too, she said.

An upgrade to the department’s software ensures plans are in the right format before they proceed to code review – a so-called prescreening process that used to take months, according to DPP, but now takes days.

And applicants can see which agency their application is currently with, and whether their plans are back with their own architects and designers. For too long, Takeuchi Apuna said, DPP has been the scapegoat for design professionals who were at least partially at fault for their own projects’ delays.

Other technical tools are on the way. DPP will be replacing its antiquated POSSE software with a program called Clariti that will make data analysis easier, Takeuchi Apuna said. That is expected to go live by the end of June.

This year, DPP piloted an artificial intelligence program called CivCheck that resulted in a 70% reduction in residential code review time and 40% reduction in stormwater review time, she said. The department plans to introduce that program more widely in the near future.

“We’re excited about that,” Takeuchi Apuna said.

Challenges remain. The department is still woefully short on engineers, who are needed to review commercial plans, with 17 current vacancies. The city struggles to recruit and retain them despite recent raises, Takeuchi Apuna said, because they can still make more in the private sector. A 2020 city audit found private sector engineers can make more than double the salaries of their municipal counterparts.

But snapshots of code review times show delays have come down substantially from their peak.

The delays have shifted from code review to other parts of the permitting process, like stormwater review, but Takeuchi Apuna says the overall times – from application to having a permit in hand — are on the decline too.

The next year should bring even more relief, she said.

“Everything we’ve worked so hard on in this first half,” she said, “it’s going to come to fruition.”