A discussion on changes to the city’s building permit fee structure continued after initially being tabled for further consideration.

The city Building and Grounds Committee is considering numerous changes suggested by Community Development Department director Nolan Ming.

“Basically, for a commercial project, we would require a $400 deposit and a $100 deposit for residential projects,” said Ming. “That deposit would be refunded upon completion of the project and final approval by the department. That’s an effort to get people to call for their inspections. There’s an incentive for them to call for them, if they are going to get some money back. Right now, they have no incentive.”

Alderman Steve Harvey expressed hesitation for the commercial deposit being $400.

“The residential seems reasonable, but the commercial is four times as much,” he said.
Ming would like to discourage the long-term use of moving or storage containers by requiring a $25 fee and an additional $25 two months later.

“This is to discourage people from keeping PODS in front of their house for an extended period of time,” said Ming. “After 60 days, they need to check back in with us and pay an additional $25. That’s just a way for us to keep an eye on them.”

Sign permit fees would be a flat $100, and a ground disturbance fee of $100 to cover inspections.
Plumbing and mechanical permits would be $100 for residential and $200 for commercial.
“The plumbing and mechanical permits are on top of all the other permit fees, so that’s an additional $100 and $200,” said Harvey. “Is that correct? Is that a big increase?”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a big difference, as far as those go,” said Ming. “It standardizes it to make it easier. We’re trying to make it easier for everyone and make it fair for everyone.”
A plan review fee would be one-half the permit fee for projects over $25,000.

Harvey asked, “Can you explain why you think it’s necessary for us to have a plan review fee for something that costs $30,000 to do?”

“At that point, you are going to have a contractor involved,” said Ming. “That’s what the state says, at $25,000 you are required to have a contractor. We feel like we need to have documents on file. We’ll have to look at something. In the past, we’ve not really done that. We’ve just said, ‘We’ll meet you out there and you can sketch up what you’re doing and we’ll inspect along the way.’ That doesn’t always work out very well, so we are requiring people to submit documents so we can review them prior to them starting construction.”
Numerous changes are under consideration.

The first discussion included switching from an honor-based estimate on the cost for the work being done to using a Building Valuation Data Table from the International Code Council for the cost of construction. The BVD table provides the average construction cost per square foot and it can be used in determining permit fees.

At this time the department relies on the person applying for the building permit to give an accurate estimate on cost and that number is used to determine the fee for the building permit. Ming said the switch is needed because people are lowballing estimates to reduce the fee.

Harvey wanted to revisit that discussion, asking if the square footage for the Building Valuation Table includes non-living spaces such as garages, outbuildings, porches and unfinished basements.
Ming replied, “I think everything is included, from what I can tell.”

“So all the others are calculated at the same cost as the living space,” said Harvey. “So it’s all calculated at the same cost for square foot? That’s significant. That changes the cost quite a bit.”

Ming again stated that he believed everything is included in the calculation, but he would look into it and bring that information back.

Committee members again tabled the measure for further consideration.