Dallas still can’t get permitting right

We’ve known for some time that Dallas struggles to issue building permits in a timely fashion to developers. Now we’ve learned that the city can’t obtain the necessary permits for its own buildings, either.

Dallas’ new permitting office didn’t obtain final occupancy approval before workers moved in, forcing the city to abruptly close the dazzling 11-story tower on Stemmons Freeway and move employees back to their old office in Oak Cliff.

It is impossible to call this mess anything other than an inexcusable management failure that is all too common at City Hall. Council member Cara Mendelsohn is asking for a special meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on General Investigating & Ethics next week to seek answers. Those answers must come with consequences. The council must hold city management responsible at high levels for this failure.

As it stands now, we know the city did not conduct basic due diligence before it spent $21 million to acquire and renovate the building. It made matters worse by moving in without approval and now has to deal with fire and other safety code violations. Any executive who made these decisions at any company would be out of a job.

The building had received a temporary certificate of occupancy for the fifth floor in December, and development services department employees began to move in. However, no other occupancy certificates were obtained for the rest of the building. The temporary certificate required final approvals from the fire department and other inspectors, but those weren’t obtained.

Roughly four years ago, the permitting unit came under fire for extreme, unacceptable delays in reviewing and issuing construction permits. Permits that should have been issued in days or weeks took months, frustrating developers who couldn’t understand why their permits stalled in the bureaucracy.

Improvement, in the form of better computer software and more staff, didn’t come until council member Paula Blackmon and Mayor Eric Johnson held former City Manager T.C. Broadnax’s feet to the fire. Issues with the development services office were among the reasons Johnson tried two years ago to oust Broadnax.

As council member Jesse Moreno recently told The News, “the frustrating part is, one, we’ve spent a lot of money and we’re shuffling staff back and forth between buildings, which isn’t a good work environment. And if the city can’t obtain its own [certificate of occupancy], I can feel how frustrated our general public is when they try to do business in our city.”

And that is precisely the problem. Builders and even residents need cities to provide services efficiently or they will go where the barriers to entry aren’t as messy and dysfunctional. If given a choice between doing business in a city that gets it right on the first try or one that struggles to provide key basic services, guess where developers will end up?

In the long run, this issue will be resolved. But what should trouble all of Dallas is that this is yet another unforced and avoidable management failure at City Hall that undermines credibility and effective stewardship.

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