A portion of Dallas’ building permit process is getting subbed out to third-party vendors in an effort to navigate demand and trim permit approval times.
Construction demand in Dallas has exhausted staff resources within the City’s building permit department, Development Services Department (DSD).
This has caused portions of the permit review process to be outsourced to third-party consultants, as Assistant DSD Director Mina Samuell Eskander said during an economic development committee (EDC) meeting on April 3.
Eskander oversees DSD’s land development team, which includes engineering, zoning, subdivision, arborists, and signs groups.
“A lot of the work has been subbed out to third-party consultants,” Eskander told EDC members.
“Just to kind of give you all an idea of where we stand now. They [third-party consultants] have basically maxed out on their capacity with their employees. So, we asked them if there was a way to hire a sub-consultant to help out — and they did,” Eskander said, adding that it was “nice of them” to accommodate DSD’s request for support.
Since then, several different sub-consultants have been hired and given more work.
The permits under their review have been specifically related to paving and drainage engineering, which has helped DSD “keep up with the workload,” Eskander explained.
“I’ve noticed a big difference over the last two months, with our review times finally starting to come down,” he told EDC members.
In terms of the building permit volume and turnaround times listed at the EDC meeting, much of it was identical to last month’s data given by Majed Al-Ghafry, assistant city manager for economic development and convention, on behalf of DSD, which was previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The latest single-family permit data from the City confirms Eskander’s observation, showing three consecutive month-over-month declines in median days to issue, according to DSD’s residential permit dashboard.
So far in 2023, DSD has managed to trim the residential permit turnaround time from a median high of 77 days in January to a low of 14 in March.
March saw the sharpest drop in the turnaround time year to date. It came in at 14 median days, a nearly 80% drop from the 64 median days in February, permit data show.
While 14 median days to issue a single-family permit may be a significant drop from the start of the year, it’s still above where it was in 2019. This was prior to DSD’s shift to an online permitting process.
DSD has made strides on the residential side of permitting in Dallas but admittedly has more work to do on the commercial side.
EDC members have requested to see the department implement a second dashboard with detailed metrics about commercial building permits.
They noted an observable shift in the department’s momentum in 2023. Yet they told DSD directors that more work was needed to be done in several related areas and that change over time would require consistency before attitudes around permitting improve.
Among the other topics discussed at the EDC meeting was the status of DSD’s new permit office at 7800 North Stemmons.
The ongoing efforts at recruitment and onboarding, as well as future steps to improve permitting in Dallas, were also talked over, according to DSD’s monthly technology and metrics review.