We have heard of many permitting issues for our small business members in our City, however, in the past 2 years, most of the complaints have come in after the project was completed. This means we weren’t able to get involved and often, that means our ability to get all the details and explain to the City what went wrong was substantially lessened.

This time we were able to help out in the middle of the issue – meaning we could get the details and we could contact the needed City staff to get answers in a prompt fashion.

The short version:

A longtime Santa Monica small business, open here for well over a decade, set out to do a modest remodel and addition to its facility. Nothing dramatic. The kind of project meant to take months, not years.

Here’s roughly how it went instead:

1. The business applied and paid initial fees to get the project moving, nearly two years ago.

2. City staff indicated the project would go through an administrative design review process rather than a full public hearing, and the business paid the fee for that track.

3. Almost two years and thousands of dollars later, the business was told the opposite: a full Architectural Review Board hearing was actually required all along.

4. A new hearing fee, roughly seven times larger than the original administrative fee, was assessed on top of the fee already paid, with no credit given for the earlier payment.

5. City staff later confirmed the underlying review threshold never actually changed during this entire two year window. In other words, this should have been caught on day one, not after two years of paperwork and two separate payments.

By the time the dust settled, the business had paid something north of $30,000 in fees alone, on top of nearly two years of uncertainty, all for a project modest enough that it probably should have sailed through in a fraction of that time.

What we did:

Once this landed on our desk, we got to work on two tracks at once.

First, we worked directly with City Planning staff to make sure the project didn’t lose any more time. That effort helped get the item onto the earliest available hearing calendar, rather than letting it drift further into a third year.

Second, once it became clear the fee situation itself needed attention, not just the scheduling, we put our concerns in writing directly to City Manager Oliver Chi. We asked the City to take a hard look at refunding the fees the business paid toward a review track that, as it turned out, never should have applied in the first place. We also raised the issue directly with City Building and Safety, since part of the fix here involves how fees get assessed and corrected once a mistake like this is identified.

Why we’re telling you this:

We want to be clear about something. This isn’t a story about a City that doesn’t care. Quite the opposite. Every person we’ve worked with on this, from Planning staff to the City Manager’s office, has been responsive, engaged, and willing to dig into the details with us. Santa Monica city staff have real workloads and real constraints, and we appreciate the time they’ve given this.

What this story does show is that even well intentioned systems can have gaps, and a modest facility improvement shouldn’t require the same two year, five figure gauntlet that a major development might reasonably expect. When something like that happens to one of our members, we think it’s worth bringing into the light, both to help that business and to make the case for fixing the process itself.

Where things stand:

As of this writing, we’re still waiting to hear back on the fee refund request. We’ll share an update once we know more.

In the meantime, we’re going to keep pushing, not to score points against the City, but because we think this case is a genuinely useful example of where the permitting system can create unnecessary cost and delay for small projects. Our hope is that the City uses it to sharpen how review thresholds and fees are communicated up front, so the next business owner with a modest remodel gets a clear answer on day one instead of two years in. We’ll keep you posted as this moves forward.

And for future issues, the City is planning to release a fully revamped Planning and Permitting software in the coming 12 months – we will have a presentation about this new software at a future GAC meeting. But until then, if you are having issues and are a Chamber Member, we are here to help.