Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor has laid out a roadmap for the permitting, licensing and zoning reforms he hopes to implement in his administration.
“ We have to make it easier to grow,” O’Connor told reporters in a Monday morning press conference. “ If we don’t make doing business easier in Pittsburgh, it’s our neighborhoods that miss out on opportunities.”
Streamlining the city’s permitting system has been a stated priority of O’Connor’s since last year’s Democratic mayoral primary. O’Connor said Monday that he wants to “encourage growth,” which was a common refrain throughout his campaign last year and a focus of his public statements since taking office.
“ For far too long, our zoning, permitting, applications, and processes have been a way for the city to say ‘no’ to a lot of projects,” O’Connor said. “ This is our way of getting to ‘yes’ so that everybody can succeed in Pittsburgh and do it quickly.”
Ultimately, he said, the city would have a “reformed zoning code that meets the modern needs of our city, that regularly maintains and ensures safe projects in our neighborhoods while reducing delays.”
O’Connor’s reform plan is the result of a citywide review and analysis that the mayor kicked off on the first day of his tenure in January: He gave departments 60 days to report back on how the permitting process can be improved. The subsequent findings indicated a host of issues, about which developers and community organizations have often expressed frustration: unclear communication and requirements, repetitive review cycles, and unpredictable permitting timelines, to name a few.
The solutions O’Connor hopes to enact are divided into phases. Phase I, which is intended to go into effect in the next several months, will see a host of smaller changes, such as streamlining service for simpler permit approvals, more efficient pre-application meetings to head off confusion down the road, and prioritizing projects by size, type, and complexity.
“ It’s speeding this process up so that we can be upfront with the details for our residents for what they need right away,” he said. He emphasized that the reforms would benefit projects of all sizes.
“ This is not just for big developers. This is more for your neighborhoods,” O’Connor said. “These are for individuals that are trying to get a permit to do work on their house. This is for a storefront that hasn’t been able to open. That’s really where this is gonna impact.”
Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor spent his first full day in office kicking off an effort to reform the city’s permitting processes — a quest he promised to undertake during his campaign last year.
O’Connor said he was also interested in looking into using “AI technologies” to review applications for missing information, as well as exploring “virtual inspections” through the city’s OneStopPGH online portal.
He also said he plans to reexamine the public review process, and have the city schedule its own public input meetings instead of leaving that responsibility to neighborhood groups known as Registered Community Organizations.
The latter change has been sought by some members of City Council, who worry the RCOs may not adequately reflect or capture local opinions about a project. But a bill that would have made such changes last year stalled after multiple postponements and eventually died with the start of the new legislative session.
Longer-term changes will include a “comprehensive update” to the city’s zoning code, which O’Connor hopes will align with the results of the city’s in-progress comprehensive plan for 2050. The $6 million price tag of that comprehensive plan, originally an initiative of former Mayor Ed Gainey, sparked debate at Council last year. O’Connor said the city is “looking at some partners” to help fund the plan and supplement taxpayer dollars, but did not specify where the money would come from.
O’Connor told reporters Monday that while he hoped procedural changes would come together quickly, Rome wasn’t rezoned in a day.
“ The zoning changes that we’re talking about [are] gonna be legislation, so that’s gonna take a little bit longer,” he said. “I think we’re pretty excited to get a lot of this stuff started.”