Do you think you have a stressful job? Try being Andrew Espinoza.
Dallas’s director of Development Services basically holds the keys to the city’s future growth and development, and it’s currently at a near-standstill due to a problem created before he was hired according to city council members on Wednesday.
It seemed the cavalry had arrived when Espinoza was hired in June to clean up the permitting backlog that began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
A lot has been done under Espinoza’s leadership, including technology upgrades, new hires, and opportunities for some builders to get same-day permits. By all accounts — from builders, elected officials, and the general public — Espinoza is likable and responsive to the demands of his high-stress job. His department, however, is operating with 78 vacancies, salaries that aren’t competitive with the private sector, and a new land management system that’s going to take two years to implement.
Development Services Audit
If the Development Services Department isn’t operating at a high level, nothing gets done in the city, several council members pointed out.
“We have to get this right,” said District 12 Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn. “This is so critical for our city and our future. If we can’t have people build, we won’t have more people move here. We won’t have our businesses grow. Everyone on this council hears people say, ‘It’s just too hard to work with Dallas.’”
Espinoza reviewed the results of a 153-page audit of the Development Services Department at the Wednesday Dallas City Council meeting and answered some tough questions about what’s being done to improve the permit turnaround time, which can still take more than two months.
“Do you think we’re the worst city in America for issuing permits?” District 8 Councilman Tennell Atkins asked.
The answer, which came from Assistant Director Vernon Young, was no.
“We think overall we’re making incredible progress,” he said. “Every day, we have to do better than we did the day before.”
Young offered an analogy that when a group of six friends goes to dinner and orders steak, everyone hears about the one guy who got the bad steak, rather than focusing on the others who had a pleasant experience.
‘A Lot of Bad Steak’
Phil Crone, executive officer for Dallas Builders Association, represents 500 builder members who mostly do business in Dallas.
He suggested in the Nov. 2 meeting that the Development Services audit conducted by Matrix Consulting Group “buried the lead.”
“Much of this report talks about Development Services and how it has to depend on other departments like HR and IT and planning, and some of the needed realignment that needs to happen,” Crone said. “We need to run the most critical department for economic development like a business. It needs to be entrepreneurial. We can’t have a situation continue where they’re not able to meet their IT and technical needs.”
Whether the problem is showing up in pre-screening, zoning, or as incomplete information on the applicant’s desk, if builders can’t measure how long a permit is going to take, they can’t figure out effective and efficient solutions, Crone said.
“Your competition is not from other departments,” he said. “Your competition is from other cities and it’s from the other side of the permitting counter. At the end of the day after three years of dealing with this, 80 percent of our members are still saying it’s taking 10 weeks or more to get a single-family residential permit out. That’s a lot of bad steak.”
Improving The Permitting Process
The ultimate goal of the department is to provide building permits within three to five days of a permit fee and application submission, Espinoza said.
The department has identified a new land management system that can better communicate with the ProjectDox system. That will improve efficiency, but it will take up to 24 months to implement. In the meantime, the department is hiring new staff and taking feedback from the building community and elected officials.
District 1 Councilman Chad West pointed out that several measures are in place to make permitting easier and faster for market-rate development, but affordable housing projects appear to be overlooked.
“I worry about the optics of us not putting an expedited method out there for affordable housing, enabling that to happen more quickly and readily,” West said in the Nov. 2 council meeting.
Espinoza said he created a team of eight staff members to work with Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization to identify affordable single-family housing and renovation projects.
“What we intend to do is partner with those developers, builders, and small business contractors and facilitate and shepherd them through that process,” he said.
West further suggested that Development Services positions be reclassified so employees can earn higher salaries.
“I know you want to have a championship team,” West said to the chief building official. “This department should be like going to the majors. You get paid more; you have an opportunity for advancement. Why can’t we shake up the way we structure this department’s pay scale so we can pay them more and offer them more incentives? This should be where everybody in the city wants to go to work.”
West asked that the matter be taken before the city’s Government Performance and Financial Management Committee.
Crone said the best change that’s been made recently is the appointment of Espinoza and other staff members who have taken ownership of the challenges.
In the 10-county region served by the Dallas BA, Dallas is “far and away the most challenging city to work with and has been for several years,” Crone said.
“There are thousands of businesses and residents who depend on this department, whose hopes and dreams are tied to this department,” he said. “There is nobody out there that wants this department to succeed more than our association and the other industry groups.”
