DALLAS — This story was originally published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. Read the original version here.
After financing, the most challenging aspect of development in Dallas could be securing a city permit.
But this barrier may be lowered, at least a little bit, as the city makes progress on cutting the turnaround time for new commercial permits.
In a Nov. 1 memo, Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley told city council members that in October, the median time to issue a new commercial construction permit was 112 days.
In 2021, Bentley wrote that the median permit time was more than 300 days.
Starting in June 2024, Dallas' Planning & Development Department published public dashboards that track permitting metrics to make the process more transparent. The commercial dashboard indicates one permit was submitted and eight were issued last month.
The Planning and Development Department itself represents a relatively new way to make permitting more efficient. The planning and permitting departments were combined under a suggestion from Tolbert in part to address complaints from developers about permitting delays. Emily Liu, the city's new director of planning and urban design, is leading this team.
The city also highlighted its work closing out "stale permits" or inactive permits that have lingered in the system. The planning team has closed nearly half — 4,547 out of 9,800 — that were clogging up the system. The memo noted that the team would work on resolving the remaining inactive permits.
Interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert touted some of the permitting improvements during an Oct. 30 conversation with Downtown Dallas Inc. President Jennifer Scripps at the 2024 State of Downtown event.
"We had over 9,800 stale permits in our system — we cleared over half of them in 100 days,” Tolbert said, adding the effort shows what can happen when leaders come together.
Scripps said efforts like this can make Dallas as attractive as its suburban counterparts, where a lot of North Texas' development seems to be headed.
"I think that this is also one of those [things] that helps the whole city, and it helps us compete with our suburban partners, so that people come here first, which is great," Scripps said.
The permitting improvement program, which formally launched Oct. 1, aims to streamline the entire commercial permitting process "with the goal of reducing turnaround time and enhancing the overall customer experience," Bentley wrote.
The team hopes to identify bottlenecks in the system and make it more efficient and responsive using data from the commercial dashboard. No specific goals or metrics were listed in the city memo.
In order to accomplish this feat, Planning & Development assembled representatives from all divisions in the permitting process including intake, minor commercial, building code, electrical, zoning and engineering.
According to a sample study of 36 multifamily permits issued between October 2023 and September 2024, the city took the longest amount of time to approve and review water engineering, zoning, paving engineering, building code and landscape permits.
In Dallas, a permit is required for almost all construction projects, including repair work. A remodel or reconstruction permit may take four to six weeks, according to the City of Dallas website.
