Denver Opening Office to Fight “Too Hard to Build” Rep

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has fired off an executive order to set up a dedicated permitting office for developers, cutting red tape in a city where he said it “was too difficult to build things.”

The mayor’s order, his first since he was elected two years ago, aims to handle start-to-finish building permits in six months — from a current nine to 10 months, the Denver Business Journal reported.

The order follows similar directives of mayors in San Francisco and Los Angeles, who issued executive orders from tackling homelessness and drugs to whisking approvals for affordable housing to quickly rebuilding homes torched by wildfires.

“One of the most important pieces of feedback we’ve gotten consistently over the last year and a half is that it is way too difficult to build things in Denver, and one of the most important components of making it a pro-business city is making sure that the permitting process is easy and smooth,” Johnston told the Denver Business Journal.

The Denver Permitting Office will open in 30 days, according to Jill Jennings Golich, the city’s new permitting czar.

With the new office run by Golich, every project will get permits within 180 days, from its concept plan to its site development plan to a city granted permit, Johnston said.

“Historically, it can take two, two-and-a-half years,” he said. “This is a dramatic shift.”

Between April last year and last month, large residential projects in Denver averaged 297 days in city and customer hands from plan submittal to approval, according to CPD’s plan review dashboard. Large commercial projects have averaged 261 days during the same period.

Under the new permitting office, if a project is in the city’s hands for more than 180 days, the developer can appeal within 14 days with the executive directors of all seven offices that work on permitting approvals, Johnston said.

This group of executive directors will also serve as the Denver Permitting Office’s oversight committee.

Developers have described Denver’s permitting process as glacial, difficult and impractical

“These issues are pushing [builders] out of the city of Denver, and I’m not the only one,” Carl Koelbel, CEO of Koelbel and Company, previously told the Business Journal. “I’ve got partners that operate nationally and they say Denver, in its current state, is the most challenging municipality outside of California to operate in from an approval process standpoint.”

With the new Denver Permitting Office, Johnston also hopes to fulfill his campaign promise to fix the city’s permitting backlog and repair relationships with local builders.

“I think this is a historic moment that will distinguish Denver as one of the best cities in America to do business and to build,” Johnston told the newspaper.

— Dana Bartholomew