Building permit wait times have been significantly cut in Whistler this year, but a fundamental shift in the demand for and nature of the work came with a steep drop in revenues for municipal hall’s building department.
“We are seeing much slower revenues this year than expected,” explained the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s (RMOW) chief financial officer Carlee Price in a Sept. 24 presentation to council.
As part of an amendment to its Five-Year Financial Plan, RMOW staff detailed how the number of permit applications through the first eight months of 2024 had flattened compared to 2023, contributing to the reduction in wait times. The report said wait times for commercial and multi-family residential permits had dropped by 50 per cent or more, and more than 40 per cent for single-family residential permit applications.
“However, the nature of the work has fundamentally shifted,” the report went on. “The shift has been away from higher-value, whole-home projects to lower-value renovation projects.”
Because the cost of each permit is based on the estimated value of the work, this shift has translated into a 27-per-cent decline in value for the average permit this year compared to last. “In addition, the number of large payments related to large and complex individual projects has fallen,” read the report.
Those two factors together contributed to a whopping 39-per-cent drop in building department revenues through the first half of the fiscal year, leading to the RMOW proposing to amend its revenue expectations for the year from $3.2 million to approximately $1.7 million. It also proposed to slash its planned expenditures for the department from approximately $2.3 million to $1.8 million, with the difference made up by a lower contribution to the municipality’s general operating reserves, “as is typically the case with changing operations,” said Price.
Fuelled by a renovation and building boom during the pandemic, combined with a severe staff shortage, a series of complex and time-consuming land-use contract terminations mandated by the province, and a 2021 cyberattack that took municipal services offline, Whistler’s building department has in recent years had to wrestle with a massive backlog of permit applications, much to the chagrin of local builders and homeowners alike.
“The permitting and development permit process in Whistler is a disaster,” Bob Deeks, owner of local building firm RDC Fine Homes, told Pique in the summer of 2022. “When you compare it to other jurisdictions as an average against the best, it’s unimaginable.”
As of Aug. 23, 2022, the height of the backlog, the RMOW said there were 524 building permit applications and 417 requests for property information. The initial review process at that time for both single-family and commercial/multi-family permits was approximately four months.
With a target of trimming wait times by 50 per cent, the RMOW added three full-time staff and one part-time staff to help sift through the backlog. Its Green Building Policy, unveiled in 2022, was designed in part to cut back on wait times by streamlining various development criteria checklists into one comprehensive list for buildings subject to rezoning (although it only applies at the building permit stage for “very large” homes, the RMOW said at the time).
