Is merging Planning and Building and Safety the best idea?

Here's a proposal that's hugely important for local businesses and developers, and yet it's barely gotten noticed. The mayor tried to push it through before the end of his term later this month, though the Council wisely put on the brakes - at least long enough to figure out the details. There's nothing wrong with consolidation per se, especially with city departments often operating like independent fiefdoms. Still, this idea is unsettling, perhaps because promises of improved efficiency could easily become code for quick-and-dirty processing. The city was forced to make all sorts of budget cuts over the last five years, resulting in significant hits at both departments. That wasn't a huge deal during the sluggish recovery, but the recovery is picking up steam, and that means more construction. Matter of fact, I've been told of longer delays at Building and Safety in getting basic permitting completed. Is anyone paying attention to that? From this week's Business Update on KPCC (Susanne Whatley fills in for Steve Julian):

Mark Lacter: It's a move that supporters believe will streamline development - what's often a really frustrating process, and one of the reasons L.A. is considered unfriendly towards business. City officials are holding off until early next year to work out the details, of which there are many.

Susanne Whatley: What's the real advantage to merging the two?

Lacter: Well, city departments don't have a great history of working well together. The problem, in this case, is that these two departments serve very different purposes - the Planning Department is geared more towards projects as they relate to overall public policy, and Building and Safety is the enforcer of rules and regulations. You could just imagine the turf wars of having one side of the department signing off on a project, and another side putting up all sorts of roadblocks.

Whatley: Sounds like two departments with different missions.

Lacter: That's right - real answer, it seems, is not just joining two departments, but coming up with more efficient ways of processing applications. If it keeps taking months - or even years - for a business owner to expand in the city of L.A., it won't much matter what your organizational chart looks like. It'll still be a mess.

Former Ventura City Manager Rick Cole has additional thoughts. From the Planning Report:

What if there is no long-term vision, but simply a mandate to "streamline" short-sighted decision-making? Of course, no one would ever admit to that. So the lame duck administration adopted simplistic sound bites to mask their void in vision. Hence laudable terms like "smart growth" or "transit-oriented development" were given lip service. For those terms to be valid, however, would require carefully calibrating them to the actual context of diverse conditions in a vast city of 3.6 million people. A high rise at an existing Red Line stop might be "smart growth." The same development would be idiotic in less favorable conditions. The "planning" function is supposed to sort that out in advance. Unfortunately, this fundamental ethos has been notably lacking in the City of Angels over the years. That may explain why so few are concerned that planning, which has never worked out particularly well there, is about to be abandoned altogether. But if the goal was to arrest the city's decline rather than accelerate it, the heedless short-term mentality driving the "merger" would receive more thoughtful evaluation, and even reconsideration.