Contractors and homeowners who plan to seek building permits from Palm Beach can expect to pay a number of new fees now that the town changed its permitting system to comply with a soon-to-be-enacted Florida law.
The Planning, Zoning and Building Department will add over 60 construction-related and compliance fees tied to the review, inspection, approval and processing of various aspects of a project, according to the department’s Director Wayne Bergman.
A resolution to enact those new fees and to revamp how the town calculates its baseline commercial and residential construction permits was begrudgingly passed by the Town Council during its meeting on June 10. The council also gave initial approval to an ordinance that will recalibrate the duration of building permits for single-family residential projects.
That ordinance will be presented for a second and final vote during the council’s July 14 meeting.
“This was thrust on us unwillingly by the state legislature, and I know we are ahead of other municipalities in resolving this, and that is thanks to the hard work of all of our team,” Council President Ted Cooney said.
House Bill 803, which becomes law July 1, drastically changes the approval process for building permits for commercial and residential developments by barring municipalities and other local governments from using a project’s construction value to help calculate the dollar amount of its building-permit fees.
The state-mandated changes, which the council first discussed on May 12, sent staff scrambling to figure out a new method of calculating construction permit fees and to find ways to add fees to pay for Town Hall staff labor carried out during the development process.
Under the new framework, the town will use the square footage of a project as the starting point for its construction permit-fee calculations, Bergman said.
That permit likely will be accompanied by a gaggle of additional building and compliance fees. Those include a fee for each aspect of the project reviewed by town staff and for various structures that comprise the project, according to the proposed fees list.
For example, a new fee will be imposed for each generator included in the project, its valuation based on the equipment’s kilowatt output. There will also be a new fee tied to the construction of fencing and calculated at a rate of $7 per linear feet, according to the list of fees.
Bergman said those who build projects in town can expect to see even more changes to the permit process as staff continues to grapple with the unanticipated changes in state law.
“This is a new process. We’ve done our best to be complete (it), but I’m sure we’ll find other things that’ll need to come back to you,” he said.
Planning, Building and Zoning Department staff are also preparing for the bill’s new time limits governing how long the town has to review project requests before issuing permits. The length of the revised review period would depend on the price and size of a project and would range from five to 60 days. As it stands now, there is no mandated timeframe for issuing permits.
Under the new law, if the review is not completed within the allotted timeframe, the permit will automatically be issued.
Bergman said with these changes, especially the tighter time limits for staff review, the department will need more employees.
“I’ve actually gone to the town manager’s office … and asked for help,” he said. “We need another body or two to help us with this.”
In the meantime, the department assigned an employee to oversee the new permitting process to ensure permits will be processed within the state’s new time limits, Bergman said.
“This new compliance officer will literally help us manually get this started, because it will take us a number of months — if not longer — to implement these changes into our” permitting software, he told the council.
The changes are so complex, the permitting software will have to be “completely rebuilt” to accommodate them, Bergman said.
Bergman also presented a new ordinance that would recalibrate the duration of construction permits for residential projects to meet the time limits required under the new law.
Those changes will see residential construction permits expire either one year after they are issued or whenever the next edition of the Florida Building Code is published.
“It’s a very convoluted algorithm,” said Bergman of how the town would have to calculate the duration of building permits for single-family homes.
He said the changes will likely increase the amount of permit-extension requests the Town Council reviews.
Council Member Bridget Moran said she was worried the permit changes would likely cause residents to spend more on construction, since residents would have to pay for each permit extension.
‘That’s something we’ll probably have to look at … and probably (revise),” Bergman responded.
Diego Diaz Lasa is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at dlasa@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach adds over 60 building fees in response to new state law
Reporting by Diego Diaz Lasa, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Diego Diaz Lasa, Palm Beach Daily News | USA TODAY Network
