Mayor Daniel Lurie will today announce a plan to merge the Department of Building Inspection, Planning Department and PermitSF into a single agency, Mission Local has learned.
The announcement, which is planned for today’s “State of the City” speech, marks the onset of forming what the mayor’s office described as a new, single entity “that fulfills all duties of the Planning and Building Inspection departments and is responsible for coordination of key citywide permitting functions.” The mayor’s office is aiming to complete this process in 18 months, by mid-2027.
This is not a move that can be accomplished by mayoral fiat: City departments’ structures and duties are enshrined in the city charter. This means that wholly merging multiple departments will require charter reform — and a simple majority vote of the people.
The mayor’s office was already planning for a November ballot measure that would give voters the choice of altering the city’s 30-year-old charter — with today’s proposed departmental mergers, among other outcomes, riding in the balance.
The Department of Building Inspection has spent the past several years working to shed a legacy of corruption and deep inefficiency. Senior building inspector Bernie Curran was in 2023 sentenced to federal prison over a bribery scheme involving corrupt engineer and permit expediter Rodrigo Santos. Santos was also sent to federal prison in that same year.
The mayor described today’s proposed merger as a means of ensuring “better coordination, time and cost savings and a more predictable permitting process.” No layoffs are planned, said Lurie’s office. Any redundancies in the departments’ respective oversight commissions will be addressed by the city’s Commission Streamlining Task Force.
In this March 16, 2020 photo, a line of permit-seekers stretched out the door of the Department of Building Inspection and down Mission Street at the exact moment the mayor and health director were announcing the initial shelter-in-place order.
Among the state’s 10 largest cities, only Los Angeles and San Francisco have wholly separate building and planning departments. In the Bay Area, Concord and Walnut Creek also split duties between two independent agencies.
But San Jose, San Mateo, San Diego, Oakland and Contra Costa County and others have combined building and planning departments. Elsewhere in the state, Sacramento and Bakersfield operate building and planning as separate divisions under an overarching organization.
San Francisco is definitely unusual, building department veterans say, in its extreme level of separation between the Department of Building Inspection and Planning. The two agencies even use separate and non-compatible software systems. (Planning uses Accela while DBI was unable to integrate Accela and spent years and millions of dollars in failing to do so. It still uses an antiquated Oracle system no longer supported by the developer.)
A merger of the sort being proposed today would do away with that entrenched separation — and, Lurie hopes, accelerate the permitting and building process.
That process could use some speeding up: A Budget and Legislative Analyst report commissioned by Supervisor Bilal Mahmood and due out in the next month or so focuses on San Francisco’s scleroticism in permitting construction projects that are approved — but not yet built. Mahmood says that preliminary analysis done for the report reveals that San Francisco lags behind Seattle, Austin, Miami, San Diego and Sacramento in the time it takes to issue permits that would allow already-approved projects to break ground.
He is hopeful that today’s proposed consolidation could make a dent in building the 50,000-odd units the city has approved that remain unbuilt.
“The devil is in the details in figuring out the implementation, but the objective is sound and worthy of exploration,” he said. “Based on the data and analysis from the Budget and Legislative Analyst, it’s clear we are one of the slowest cities to build in large part because of the way city government is structured.”
Supervisor Myrna Melgar also described the consolidation as much-needed — if done right.
“Merging the Planning and Building Inspection components of the building process makes sense and, if done appropriately, could address the continuing challenges of inefficiency, lack of continuity and transparency, and corruption,” she said. “We have attempted for years to integrate the processes and failed. I hope this effort gets the resources and energy it deserves. Also the oversight.”