Tampa's booming. Mayor Jane Castor's challenges: Keep up. Don't get in the way.
To do both, City Hall is looking at streamlining the permit process, keeping offices open later to expand access and having a list of certified arborists at the ready to help property owners get tree permits.

By Richard Danielson
Tampa Bay Times
Published: Dec 25, 2019

TAMPA - It's not unusual for new mayors to arrive at Tampa City Hall with a to-do list that includes ironing out the kinks in the city's bureaucracy for handling building permits and other development plans.

Bob Buckhorn talked about making changes so fundamental that he described them as re-writing the city's DNA. Dick Greco banned city employees from denying permits based on unwritten "internal policies.”Now it's Mayor Jane Castor's turn. She starts with a city that's been permitting about $2 billion worth of construction a year and has brightened its reputation as a place to do business.

A couple of developers, including the increasingly busy Related Group , have told the City Council recently that getting development permits here is much easier than in, say, Miami, where Related is headquartered.

Major projects like Water Street Tampa, Midtown Tampa and Tampa International Airport $2 billion expansion are now in mid-stride. And there's more to come: A major redevelopment of the West River area northwest of Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park is about to begin, and the 300,000 square feet of the old Austin Center professional buildings are being rebranded and refreshed as the Westshore City Center.

So a main problem is not encouraging development in the first place. It's keeping up.

"They have a good unit over there that has been functioning well," Castor says of the city's construction services division, "but with the acceleration in the development here in our community, they can't maintain that pace.”

In June, about two months after taking office, Castor appointed an advisory committee of local professionals from real estate, construction, the law, architecture and neighborhoods to assess whether the city has the people it needs to meet growing demands, to improve the user experience for both development professionals and residents, and to identify procedural bottlenecks and outdated regulations.

The group wrapped up its work last month with a series of recommendations that are more tweaks than major overhauls.

For example, the committee said the city's Accela development software, which is meant to make city permits easier to apply for and more transparent to the public, is still too hard to use seven years after the city bought it.

"Many novice users, and even sophisticated and experienced builders, often criticize the system for not being user-friendly,” the committee said in its report to Castor. Some homeowners who hire a contractor to do a renovation or expansion can't even use the system to track the status of the work being done in their own kitchens, the committee said, and that should change.

As a result, the city is working to make Accela more user-friendly, and to provide classes for residents who want to learn more.

Other recommendations include:

• Reviewing the city's fees for development filings and applications, some of which have been in place since 2006.

• Establishing an ongoing process to evaluate city needs in its development review operations. In the past, the committee said, previous updates resulted in progress being made, but there was no continuous assessment in place to keep performance from deteriorating.