The permit is taking forever

Q. I’m waiting months for a permit, and they keep asking for added notes and plan changes, but not all at once. It’s a complete runaround. Why is this happening? My business is losing money, and I’m losing patience.

A. Many years ago, the legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite ended each broadcast with, “And that’s the way it is.”
The reasons for your delay are multi-faceted, public and private, starting with poor communication by both. Regulations and procedures are part of the problem. Ignoring regulations makes the process grind to a halt. You can complain about how long it takes, but the truth is that many people, in and out of government, can be financial killers. Businesses sit stagnant. Homeowners can’t move on with their lives; money is lost to increased material costs during the permit process. This encourages people to avoid getting permits, and then they get caught.
Bigger building departments clog their systems by sending unclear notes instead of specifically identifying items that need to be addressed, slowing the process while people scramble to figure out what the cryptic objections meant. (At least they aren’t scribbled like they used to be, before computerization.) That’s just the way it is.
You have an idea of what you want, but no idea of the tons of requirements to be met, the seemingly random steps to climb, one at a time. To smooth out the process, start with a good, readable legal survey description of your property. Keep in mind that many people believe that old building department plans are accurate, but 90 percent of the time, those plans were not followed by constructors, who treated them like suggestion and deviated, or changes were made without filing for permits. That slows the process, and the design professional’s process takes longer.

Unfortunately, many plans are a fudged version of reality. If you receive a plan with no fractions in room dimensions, everything rounded off to perfect numbers, be assured that those plans are false. It’s impossible to have no fractions in every number. Knowing that, most constructors have adjusted to ignore plan measurements, thus setting into motion the fact that many plans on record at building departments are inaccurate, but that’s the way it is. This all slows the process.
Most of the time these changes are only caught many years later, when someone compares the plans with the building and realizes that something’s wrong. Future projects are thus bound to have code compliance and planning problems, further slowing plan development and approvals. There are also many cases in which plans were “flipped” to the opposite of what the plans show. This was a common, accepted practice between builders and building departments.
The strictness of your building department is often based on rules made because somebody tried to get away with something, like the person who put a bomb in their shoe causing us to take our shoes off at the airport. That’s just the way it is. More next week on pitfalls to avoid.

© 2025 Monte Leeper. Readers are encouraged to send questions to yourhousedr@aol.com, with “Herald question” in the subject line, or to Herald Homes, 2 Endo Blvd., Garden City, NY 11530, Attn: Monte Leeper, architect.