San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S. F. constructs bureaucratic nightmares
Myrna Melgar wants to scrap the old, flimsy aluminum gazebo in the fenced backyard behind her Ingleside home and build a wooden one.
But this is San Francisco, which like a cantankerous president of a homeowners association, likes to stick its nose into everything its residents and business owners want to do to their own property.
Does Melgar need a city permit to build a gazebo in her own garden? She’s the wellconnected, savvy former president of the San Francisco Planning Commission, but she has no idea.
And there’s no easy, online way to check. She found a mindnumbing document called “Getting a City Permit,” but it doesn’t seem to spell out the gazebo question.
Or maybe she fell asleep before getting to that part of the 58page document that begins, “Obtaining a city permit can undoubtedly be one of the most confusing processes you may ever experience.”
That’s the truth. And if Melgar, who will be sworn into the Board of Supervisors next
month, can’t figure it out, no regular person has a chance. The gazebo conundrum is merely annoying to Melgar, but it illustrates a far bigger problem for San Francisco. The Department of Building Inspection has long overseen a system that is such a tangled, confusing, oldfashioned mess that it’s impossible for a normal person to navigate.
And that’s contributed to the paytoplay culture that was allegedly adopted by some people associated with the department — including the director who resigned in March amid the widening City Hall corruption scandal and a former commissioner who faces prison time.
It’s all such a complex web that “permit expediter” is an actual profession in San Francisco in which connected people charge large sums — topping $ 200 an hour — to spend their days at the department walking their client’s permit applications to the right desks, making necessary changes and extracting permits faster than normal.
The system is rife with problems. It jacks up the cost of projects in already exorbitant San Francisco and contributes to the worldfamous unaffordability of our housing. It makes corruption more likely because it creates a greasypalmed, it’swhoyouknow way of getting permission to build.
And it leaves people who can’t afford expediters at the back of the line even if they’re the smallbusiness owners, middleclass families and immigrants we claim we want to help succeed.
Building Inspection Commissioner Jon Jacobo, appointed by the Board of Supervisors in January, said that while the pandemic has taken his attention this year, he wants to streamline the department to the benefit of regular people and ultimately eliminate “permit expediter” as a profession.
“Is this the Chicago of the 1930s?” he asked.
It sure seems like it. Let’s review.
The department’s top dog, Tom Hui, resigned in March after a city attorney’s investigation alleged Hui gave preferential treatment to permit expediter Walter Wong and developer Zhang Li in exchange for gifts and meals.
The city attorney’s investigation was prompted by corruption charges against Public Works chief Mohammed Nuru in a federal probe that has since ensnared five top city officials and others, including
Wong.
A separate investigation begun by the city attorney’s office prompted federal charges in May for bank fraud against Rodrigo Santos, a former member of the Building Inspection Commission appointed by thenMayor Willie Brown in 2000.
Santos, who owns a structural engineering company, allegedly deposited nearly half a million dollars in his personal account that was intended for city agencies. In one brazen example, he allegedly changed the letters “DBI” on a check to “RoDBIgo Santos.” He’s out on bail but, according to Mission Local, he’s still at DBI regularly pulling permits. He could not be reached for comment.
Brown, who acknowledged he’s helping to fund Nuru’s legal defense, told KQED last week he doesn’t understand why people are so angry about the corruption charges.
He said the officials had just “been more tolerant of those entertaining them” and that their actions don’t have “a whole lot of implications for the operation of city government.” That’s about the lowest bar set for a government official I’ve ever seen.
“It’s not like someone built a bridge and used inferior products to build the bridge, and therefore risked the lives of lots of people,” added Brown, a Chronicle columnist.
The city’s paytoplay politics do matter. It means people who aren’t wealthy and well connected have a tougher time seeing their home and business dreams come to fruition.
Patrick O’Riordan, interim director of DBI, said the vast majority of people working for the department and their customers “do the right thing every day.” He said he can’t speak to the motivations of those who haven’t.
“My vision is one of accountability, transparency, efficiency and customer service,” he said, adding that his team must follow state building codes and all the layers added on top of them by the Board of Supervisors over the years, making the operation complex by nature. “I couldn’t be more empathetic to people’s frustrations.”
He’s helped cut the backlog of permit applications from a few thousand to 750, added more overthecounter permit appointments to his staff’s schedule and moved some simple types of permits online. Still, there’s a long way to go. Remember Jason Yu, the father of two little kids who wants to open an ice cream shop in the Mission? In early October, I told you about his twoyear long quest to open Matcha n’ More in a longvacant restaurant space. He signed a lease for $ 7,300 a year and a half ago, and he still doesn’t have permits to begin remodeling.
Has he made progress since the column appeared? Nope.
“It’s not going to be a small ice cream shop that’s going to pay big money to cut in line,” Yu said. “It’s big businesses who can pay fees to get their projects expedited.”
He and his business partner have sunk $ 200,000 into the effort and must decide whether to give up or hang on and attempt to recoup all that cash selling cones.
Christine Gasparac, assistant director of DBI, said Yu’s permit application needs signoff from the Department of Public Health. After that, DBI will invoice Yu and issue the permit after he pays up.
Miguel Echeverria can relate to Yu’s frustration. The owner of Taqueria El Buen Sabor on Valencia Street wants to tile the restaurant’s restroom. He began the work in the spring, but somebody complained, and the city told him he needed a permit. He applied in June.
“We’re still waiting,” he said six months later. “It’s stuck. It’s not moving. I don’t know why.”
He said he’d never heard of a “permit expediter,” but he can’t afford one anyway. And why should he have to hire one just to tile his bathroom?
Gasparac said Echeverria hasn’t responded to DBI’s comments regarding changes that need to be made to comply with building codes.
Matt Reagan, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy organization, said he hears stories like this regularly. DBI’s byzantine permitting system, he said, was created decades ago to make building as difficult as possible.
“It’s a process that was designed to be slow and cumbersome and complicated and difficult,” he said, “and at every turn, people are shoveling, not throwing, sand into the gears to slow it down and stop it.”
He said corruption is a natural byproduct of “an Olympiccaliber obstacle course” to gaining permits. The system, he said, invites people to take shortcuts and to hire the pricey permit expediters that make projects more expensive in a city where construction costs are already astronomical.
Now, Reagan said, it costs $ 1 million to build a onebedroom marketrate apartment, and as much as $ 800,000 to build a socalled affordable housing unit.
So what can be done? Melgar has some ideas for legislation after she’s sworn in as supervisor. She wants to require DBI to adopt an online system to make it far easier and more transparent for a regular person to track the progress of their permit application.
Amazingly, DBI has such a system, but the department still isn’t using it. It paid $ 4.5 million in 2011 — nine years ago! — to a software company called Accela for it and paid more money to the company over the years to fix bugs. The Planning Department, as well as departments in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, D. C., and Atlanta, are using Accela.
O’Riordan said Accela didn’t meet DBI’s business goals or schedule, and that the department is exploring a new contract.
Melgar blames DBI, not Accela. She believes it’s possible for DBI and the Planning Department to use one linked system so permits can be tracked. She said DBI was “totally inflexible” and unwilling to change its forms to adapt to the Accela system.
“I cannot accept that in the heart of Silicon Valley, we can’t have an online permitting system that works,” she said.
She plans to legislate a system in which inspectors with the Planning Department and DBI are teamed by neighborhood. So, say, Joe from Planning would help you with a project in North Beach and automatically introduce you to Bill from DBI to finish the job.
She’s also supportive of merging Planning and DBI into one department, though that’s a more controversial idea.
“We’ve been talking around and around about how people get away with the things that they do,” she said. “There’s a lot of cleanup that needs to happen.”
There sure is.
By the way, I asked DBI about Melgar’s gazebo. Does she need a permit? This is San Francisco. Of course she does.