Dan Fumano: City hall permit delays get worse as small businesses struggle

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After working hard to keep her gym afloat through a global pandemic that was particularly brutal in her industry, Carolyn Williams spent the last few weeks grappling with the possibility that her business could be shut down on a piece of paper.

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Or, more accurately, turn off waiting for a sheet of paper.

Since August, the owner and operator of the Bar Method gym in downtown Vancouver had been trying to obtain the occupancy permit necessary for the continued survival of the business she built for 11 years.

Williams was sickened with concern that she might lay off most of her 22 employees if she couldn’t get permission to operate in her new location in time after being forced to relocate her business due to circumstances beyond her control.

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He faced the delays and bureaucratic confusion that have been the scourge of many other small business owners in Vancouver for years. Recently, staff and council and a new task force have focused on red tape and backlogs in the city’s permitting department. But while business owners wait to see promised improvements, city numbers show wait times are increasing, not decreasing.

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Finally, on Wednesday night, Williams got the news he had been waiting for: his occupancy permit arrived.

“I’m relieved and I panic,” Williams said Wednesday night.

Relieved that the contractor she had hired months earlier was finally able to get started on the minor renovations. Panicked because the delays meant that she now had very little time to get work done without a major disruption to her business.

If the permits had been issued closer to the city’s internal target for processing in five weeks, rather than the eight weeks it took, there would have been plenty of time for renewals and “we could close on a Sunday and reopen around the corner. corner on Monday, ”he said.

Williams learned in January that he needed to find a new home for the business, after the city council approved a developer’s application to rebuild the Beatty Street building that housed his studio. Finding a suitable space in the neighborhood was not easy, but by July, she had signed a lease. She hired a contractor that month for minor renovations, and in August applied to the city for an occupancy permit.

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After that, he encountered many delays and hurdles that, he said, seem unreasonable for such a seemingly straightforward permit application.

Time was running out: I had to leave the Beatty Street location by the end of October. But for the past two months, when Williams tried to get answers from the city council, he didn’t feel the same sense of urgency on the other end of the line.

“Either I got no response, or I got a ‘I can’t do that’ response,” he said. “This is a very broken system, if small business owners who are displaced literally have to beg and cry and beg for some progress on an occupancy permit. … Doesn’t Vancouver Want Small Businesses To Succeed? Because it doesn’t feel that way. “

Williams’ story is not unique.

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The balloon and the mail reported earlier this year on the plight of a pharmacy owner who spent seven months and $ 30,000 more than he expected trying to navigate the permitting process to simply move his nearly 30-year-old business to an adjoining space on West 10th Avenue. The pharmacy’s owner, the Globe reported, was just one of many Vancouverites struggling with “a system so entangled in its own bureaucracy and so contradictory in the way it implements policies” that it causes “serious financial problems. enormous stress and a feeling at times that the city is actively working against them. “

Loco BC, a Vancouver-based nonprofit research organization for local businesses, sounded an alarm last year, launching a study that found Delays to the average permit or license in Vancouver can cost small businesses and the local economy more than $ 700,000, between lost income, costs of leasing, employment, and vendor sales. Each additional week of delay cost more than $ 30,000 in economic loss, the report found.

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Loco BC CEO Amy Robinson said this week that the COVID-19 pandemic produced a ray of light by speeding up and simplifying some of these processes.

During the pandemic, the city began digitizing part of the permitting process, eventually stopping requiring paper-based submissions. As recently as 2020, a surprising amount of permit business had to be done manually with paper presentations – it was common to see long lines of people with rolled papers on the sidewalk outside the city’s permit department, waiting for the office. to open.

The backyard expansion program launched last year, aimed at keeping restaurants and bars running during the pandemic, was hailed by business owners, some of whom commented that it felt like the first time that the city council was truly on the move. his side and worked to help them. and don’t get in their way.

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But, Robinson said this week, that momentum hasn’t continued.

Part of the modernization driven by COVID “gave everyone hope that the system would transform, because we need transformative change,” Robinson said. “But I don’t hear that that’s happening.”

City statistics show that average processing times for minor commercial renewal permits have increased by 60 percent since September 2019, which is the last time wait times were at the city’s internal goal of five. weeks.

By March 2020, when the pandemic occurred, wait times were up to 6.1 weeks, before dropping to 5.7 weeks in June 2020, the month Loco’s report was released. Since then, delays have increased steadily, and figures provided this week by the city show that median processing times are eight weeks, the highest in the five-year period for which figures are available.

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The problem has been “decades in the making” and has contributed to the struggles and defeats of many companies, Robinson said. “I am very sorry for the staff, because it must be extremely stressful, it is the system that is broken. But how do you get the system to change? “

The city has tried to improve.

Corrie Okell, Vancouver’s director of permitting services, said: “Right now, there is a lot of momentum from the council to improve our timelines.”

“I think we are moving in the right direction. We have taken drastic steps to improve permit processing times, ”Okell said.

In the spring, the council established a “permit modernization” working group to find ways to finish increasing delays in obtaining permits. Approved by the Council the last actions last week, designed to “support commercial and small business renovations.” The city says last week’s changes aim to make it eight to 20 weeks faster for many businesses that change use or occupancy, and reduce permit wait times by 17 weeks for “small suite” applications that qualify.

Hopefully those measures, and more to come, will work.

But no change will come fast enough to help small business owners who are currently stuck in the queue, as Williams was until Wednesday night, waiting and waiting, helpless.

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