How Boston’s Building Boom Gets Its Permits

There are major changes underway at the city’s permitting agency that will affect everything from home renovations to major construction.

The Mayor’s office says waiting times for building permits are down significantly thanks to new reforms. Flickr Creative Commons

By Kelly O'Brien

January 12, 2015

5 minutes to read

A city in bloom is chaotic. The skyline bristles with cranes. Lawmakers propose to move entire roadways.Old makes way for new so fast that people mistake a planned demolition for a building collapse.

And chaos isn’t the only measure by which Boston is in bloom. The Boston Redevelopment Authority approved $3 billion in new projects in 2014. The total value of city property topped $100 billion for the first time, an increase of more than 10 percent over 2013.

Somewhere near the heart of all that chaotic growth is the Inspectional Services Department, an unassuming title for an agency that touches every building project in the city. Anybody trying to get in on the construction game, whether they’re renovating a single family home or building the Millennium Tower, has to go through the offices of the ISD to be approved for one of the city’s more than 40 types of building permits.

Or rather, they did have to go through the office at 1010 Massachusetts Ave., on the edge of Dorchester’s Newmarket Industrial District. Because at the same time the ISD is processing more permit applications than ever – over 60,000 in 2014 – it is also launching a major effort to streamline the process, which means sending fewer people to Dorchester en route to a renovated kitchen in Back Bay or East Boston.

Homeowners and construction professionals alike would save themselves a lot of time and frustration by understanding the new permitting system.

Bureaucracy goes digital

The fifth floor office of the Inspectional Services Department’s Building Division is decidedly not chaotic, though it was busy even at 9 a.m. on a snowy Friday. A checkered linoleum path cuts through the floor plan, lined on both sides by a series of long blue counters, behind which ISD employees are grouped by service – Plans & Zoning; Electrical; Plumbing & Gas.

Electrical, plumbing, gas and minor renovation permits make up a majority of the applications the ISD processes, but account for a minority of the office traffic. Those applications have been entirely online since 2009. Homeowners can apply for the permits themselves, or have a contractor do it for them. Either way, said ISD Director of Buildings Harry McGonagle, every year about 10,000 of those permits are issued the same day the agency receives an application for them.

It’s the “Long Form’’ applications, which touch issues of zoning or entail a submission of building plans, that require more attention and are the focus of the city’s efforts at reform. Since the summer, Mayor Martin Walsh has issued a number of changes to the permitting process, which include doubling the number of hours the Zoning Board of Appeals spends in hearings and creating a sub-board that handles only appeals from small business and 1- or 2-family residence building projects.

In August, Walsh held the HubHacks Challenge, a hackathon that invited programmers to improve some aspect of the permitting process. One of the projects to come out of that weekend was integrated into the city’s website and unveiled in December as the Permit Finder.

The site allows anyone to see a detailed breakdown of exactly where his or her application is within the ISD. It’s primarily a tool for homeowners to get the information they need without getting caught in the ISD’s hive of activity. As McGonagle, who has been with the department for 27 years, said, “Trying to get through here on the phone when you figure we get 100,000 applications a year – it’s tough to get a planning inspector.’’

But the Permit Finder also has implications for professionals much more familiar with the historically convoluted workings of the permit process, people known commonly as expeditors.

Expeditors is a catch-all term for workers who act as liaisons between the city building inspectors and the people applying for a permit. Some expeditors are independent, hired by commercial developers or individual homeowners on a project-by-project basis. Others work full-time for one company, keeping track of all the forms, plans and other documents that company has submitted to the city for its various projects.

Christina Guarnotta has been a “Permitting Specialist’’ at Garland Building since 2007, and played a similar role at another company for years before that. Standing at the Plans & Zoning counter as a plan reviewer hammered a rubber stamp onto page after page of her blueprints, Guarnotta recalled the days – not so long ago – when she had to fill out applications on special typewriters in the ISD offices.

As for her first attempt at the new Permit Finder system? “It didn’t work,’’ she said. “I put in the [permit] number but it said it had no record of it. I was like I know that’s my permit!’’

“Yeah, that’s normal,’’ said the reviewer stamping her plans.

Guarnotta shrugged. “There’s always some glitches.’’

Glitches aside, the new system will put some expeditors in a precarious position. “There will be less people coming in period’’ as ISD expands its online presence, said McGonagle, so the role of expeditor will certainly shift and could shrink.

Guarnotta pointed out that the permitting process in Cambridge is already almost entirely digital. “You don’t really even have to go in at all if you don’t want to,’’ she said.

But Guarnotta, who has enough other responsibilities that she isn’t worried for her job security if Boston’s overhaul means less time in the ISD offices, said sometimes she actually prefers being there. “You get to know them and can interact, as opposed to feeling like there’s no face to face,’’ she said. “Plus you learn if something’s wrong.’’

What’s a homeowner to do?

Homeowners jumping into the building or renovation process for the first time would be wise to hear the message behind Guarnotta’s words, said the ISD’s Chief Building Inspector Peter Sun.

Sun said whether you’re filling out an application on your own or hiring an expediter to do it on your behalf, someone should be asking as many questions as possible.

“Where people often run into trouble is they don’t know exactly what kinds of plans they need. If you’re adding a room we probably don’t need all the bells and whistles of a new construction,’’ Sun said.

McGonagle agreed, saying, “Somebody may have a small project, but maybe it’s on Beacon Hill and you have all this stuff you didn’t know you needed.’’

Much of the ISD’s job is actually coordinating a building proposal with other agencies to make sure, for example, it’s not contaminating a water source, interrupting transportation plans or violating the rules of a historic district. That kind of thing can sneak up on a homeowner.

“It’s a complicated process. Not as complicated as it seems, but to a homeowner it probably is,’’ said McGonagle.

He added that the department’s move online is only a partial fix. The real benefit to homeowners will come if the city can make zoning regulations themselves more efficient.

“There are parts of the zoning code we think we can eliminate that don’t really impact the neighborhood,’’ like the current requirement that any addition over 200 square feet has to get approval from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, said McGonagle.

McGonagle said zoning reform has been on the table for a long time, but it is becoming more important as city regulators try to keep up with a building boom. Hopefully, the ISD can continue to keep the chaos under control in Boston.