Santa Rosa taps firm to review city development process

Facing a surge of interest in building activity but a historically low level of housing starts, Santa Rosa is taking another stab at making its oft-criticized process for reviewing and approving development more customer-friendly and efficient.

The city has hired a San Jose consulting firm to conduct a wide-ranging assessment of its Community Development and related departments to suggest ways to streamline review and approval of residential and commercial projects.

The $74,500 consulting contract with comes as the City Council seeks to find ways to encourage more affordable housing development in Santa Rosa. Council members will soon be deciding whether to spend up to $1 million next year to offer incentives to such developments.

Improving the way the city handles building permit approvals is another way Santa Rosa may be able to help accomplish the same overall goal, said City Manager Sean McGlynn.

“What we’re striving to do is to review our processes and see where we can do better and bring some certainty to the process from a customer’s perspective,” McGlynn said.

The move comes amid a mini-rebound in building activity in the city, after housing starts in the wake of the recession plunged to lows not seen in 40 years. The number of planning applications in Santa Rosa - ranging from new subdivisions to commercial signs - rose 13 percent in 2013 and 12 percent last year. Building permits in the city are seeing an even sharper increase this year, up 20 percent over the same period in 2014, according to the city.

Management Partners, the South Bay consulting firm, has been working behind the scenes for about a month, and this week began interviewing development professionals as well as housing, environmental and neighborhood activists.

Builders and developers who’ve watched various reform efforts at City Hall come and go with various success are taking a wait-and-see approach to the review.

As he was heading into his interview with a Management Partners consultant Tuesday, Robert Cantu, chair of the Construction Coalition, said he was encouraged at the scope of the effort. Past attempts to streamline the development review process only seemed to go after the “low-hanging fruit” and not a more comprehensive approach, he said.

“They’ve looked at it incrementally, but they’ve never looked at it in totality,” Cantu said.

Some changes the city has attempted in the past have been encouraging, such as the effort to allow same-day approval for some building permits, Cantu said. But they “never seem to stick,” he said, noting that the program went away when the person in charge of it retired.

The city opted to hire an outside consulting firm because of the volume of work involved and the need to keep the development review process running smoothly while the assessment is ongoing, McGlynn said.

Dan Marks, a consultant with Management Partners, said he was getting some “very candid” information from about 18 members of the public the firm planned to interview. Consultants have already interviewed staff from several city departments, and have performed detailed “process maps” outlining how things are done and why, he said.

“Often our best recommendations come from staff,” said Marks, a former community development director in Berkeley.

Generally speaking, California cities that cut planning staff aggressively during and after the recession didn’t have the luxury to make strategic reductions, he said. Now that demand for building is rising, they want to be smart about how they meet that demand and avoid the need for painful cuts in the future. Some communities are exploring outsourcing more work. Santa Rosa already outsources some aspects of the development review process, but Marks declined to speculate if he would be recommending a similar approach to future hires.

He said the city manager and City Council would have to work out such policy decisions.

“A lot of cities are facing the same exact set of issues,” Marks said. “They downsized, now they’re upsizing and how do they do that effectively?”

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.