Honolulu will allow some developers to OK their own projects
More than a year after the Honolulu City Council created a program to reduce the city’s backlog of building permit applications, the city’s permitting department director said she’s close to starting the program.
The delay, said Department of Planning and Permitting Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, stems from the same problem that has bogged down some permit applications for over a year: staffing shortages.
That backlog has real effects in a city that desperately needs more housing. The city’s lengthy approval process not only delays construction, it makes it harder to get financing.
Under the new program, builders will not have to wait for DPP to review a project to ensure it meets the city building code. Instead, the department will issue a permit based on an architect or engineer’s “self-certification” that their plans are satisfactory. That should allow them to start building much more quickly.
Paul Lam, who develops affordable rental housing, said the program could make a big difference in how quickly he can work.
“When I acquire a piece of land,” he said, “instead of that year or more of getting the permit to start construction, now I’m hoping that we can self-certify in months. And if we’re able to cut a year out of the equation, can you imagine the number of projects that I can build?”
Only certain types of projects are eligible for the program, including commercial interior renovations, projects on property controlled by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and low-rise affordable rental housing, which the City Council has pushed to make easier to build. The program affects only the issuance of a building permit; after construction, DPP will inspect the building in person before issuing a certificate of occupancy.
The program is meant as a temporary measure to chip away at the backlog as DPP replaces its outdated software and fills dozens of vacancies.
Projects approved under the new program still will need approval from other agencies such as the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and the State Historic Preservation Division. But at least it will eliminate the initial review by DPP.
“That’s the tremendous delay,” Lam said. “And that frees up DPP as well, to take on so much other work.”
A Slow Rollout
The program was created to help DPP manage the impact of understaffing, but that understaffing slowed the program’s launch.
The city council enacted the law allowing for self-certification in November 2023, authorizing it for four years. But it took the permitting department over a year to create the rules governing the program. When the bill was being considered, Takeuchi Apuna estimated that would take three to nine months.
In an interview with Civil Beat this week, Takeuchi Apuna said the delay, like most problems at DPP, is tied to a lack of staffing. A quarter of the positions in the department are vacant, she said.
In recent months, Council Member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam has been asking what’s going on with the program. “We had passed this law and I hadn’t heard anything about it,” he told Civil Beat.
He sent two letters that went unanswered, according to his office. In January, he sent another, giving the department 10 days to answer a list of questions about how many people had taken advantage of the self-certification program and what impact it had on the permitting backlog.
Takeuchi Apuna responded the next week, saying the program had not yet been launched but she hoped it would be ready by the end of February. As of this week, when Civil Beat contacted her, it still wasn’t ready.
“I wish we could say that we’re opening it up this week,” Takeuchi Apuna said. The holdup, she said, is that her staff is still creating the training videos and test required of architects and engineers in order to participate.
“We have so many initiatives happening right now,” she said, “which is super not ideal because we’re using existing staff to pull from. But I don’t know how else to do it.” She said she hopes people will be able to sign up for self-certification classes in the next few weeks.
The delay in launching the program didn’t surprise developer Geena Thielen, who sometimes partners with Lam on affordable rental projects. “I kind of laughed when I heard the original timeline,” she said.
Program Narrower Than Mayor Wanted
The program targets a narrow slice of development projects, contrary to what Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s administration envisioned when officials said they wanted to reduce the permit backlog across the board.
“There was never any intent from the administration that this be limited to certain projects or certain types of projects,” city managing director Mike Formby testified in 2023 during a zoning committee hearing a couple weeks before the bill passed.
But council members shrank the scope of the program because they said DPP needed to make sure projects were built safely and so they could limit the frequency with which housing projects could pop up in their neighborhoods. They decided that only certain types of projects would be eligible and added a requirement that applied to people building certain types of affordable rental housing.
In 2019, council members tried to spur development of affordable rental housing with Bill 7, which waived permit fees for those projects and temporarily exempted them from property taxes.
But many of the small properties targeted by that law are owned by people who have little development experience and aren’t licensed professionals, Takeuchi Apuna said. A lot of those applicants submitted plans that didn’t follow code regarding fire safety, plumbing and electrical work, according to a presentation by her department in 2023.
For that reason, anyone seeking to build low-rise, affordable housing can participate in the self-certification program only if DPP has approved at least two of their projects and has issued at least one certificate of occupancy.
Lam and Thielen, who have experience with bigger projects, are among the few developers of such projects whose architects would be eligible.
Takeuchi Apuna said she expects up to 100 people to take advantage of the program. The training modules and test will take no more than a day to complete, she said.
“I don’t see a lot of people constantly asking about this,” she said. “I think it’ll serve a smaller number, but it’ll satisfy them.”
Builders could lose their privilege to self-certify if they’re charged with bribery, if the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs begins disciplinary proceedings against them or if their plans are found to be noncompliant with the law.
DPP was rocked by a bribery scandal in 2021 that saw five workers and one architect go to prison for expediting permits in exchange for thousands of dollars.
Anyone whose self-certification registration is suspended or denied can appeal that decision to the DPP director for a hearing with the city’s Building Board of Appeals, which is made up of industry professionals.
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.