Snohomish County Planning and Development Services

Leadership: Craig Ladiser, director; Greg Morgan, deputy director

Current projects: Implementing a low-impact-development requirement for all permits and expediting LID projects; recently started a wireless dispatch for building inspectors and next year will expand the program to planners

Photo courtesy of Snohomish County Planning and Development Services Don Beckwith, a building inspector for Snohomish County Planning and Development Services, logs into the department’s wireless dispatch system. Inspectors are now dispatched from home four days a week, saving an estimated $45,528 yearly.

Following a severe drop in construction activity and associated budget cuts, Snohomish County’s Planning and Development Services is cutting its staff in half. Craig Ladiser, who has served as director of the department since 2004 and started working for the county in 1986, said 2008 has brought the lowest number of permit applications in the history of department record keeping.

Ladiser’s staff of 240 is going down to about 123 people. An agreement with the county’s Public Works Department will allow 40 former Planning and Development Services employees to transfer to that department, while the remaining employees will be laid off. Ladiser said the public works agreement makes sense because it allows his department to call those employees back if permit volume picks up again.

“What this allows me to do is pull those people back quickly,” Ladiser said. “If the recovery comes sooner, I’ll be in a better position to not be an obstacle.”

Huge drop in houses

The department’s single-family residential permitting drop has been significant. The department has received 1,282 permits for new houses in 2008 (through October). That compares with 3,092 last year, 3,812 in 2006 and nearly 4,500 in 2005. In 2000, that number was still much higher than this year, at 2,865. The department estimates there are around 1,500 vacant lots in the county that are ready for houses to be built but for which permits have not been applied. The type of single-family permits coming in has also changed, Ladiser said, with smaller houses being proposed than those last year.

But Ladiser said multifamily and commercial permits are still coming in pretty steadily. The county recently picked up several new companies: Korry Electronics is building a 216,000-square-foot factory at Paine Field planned for completion in 2009 and Primus International is building a 104,000-square-foot factory at the Wellington Hills Business Campus. In 2006, Goodrich also relocated its Seattle-area office to Snohomish County.

Officials at Korry and Goodrich told the Everett Herald they were impressed with the speed and smoothness of the county’s permitting process.

Shorter commutes

Ladiser said he predicts that Snohomish County, which has about 100,000 people who commute to Seattle for work, will soon see more of its residents able to stay in their home cities for work. He said more employers are becoming aware of the highly skilled workforce in Snohomish County and expects more companies to move in to take advantage of that.

Ladiser, who walks two blocks to his downtown Everett office every day, said though gas prices have gone back down, many Snohomish County residents have made changes to the way they live that they won’t want to give up.

Ladiser said several downtowns in the region are ripe for development and cities are building density. He said six cities in the county are now working on annexations larger than the 10,000-person threshold that will allow them to qualify for a sales tax rebate.

“I think what the cities are starting to realize is in order to sustain the taxes, you have to have the density,” Ladiser said.

Wireless dispatch

One of Ladiser’s biggest goals is making technological improvements at the department to allow workers to go paperless and wireless and save money. Last year, the department’s building inspectors started wireless dispatching, allowing them to check in from home in the morning rather than having to travel to department offices before setting off again for the day’s inspections. They can also access and print permitting material and updates from their cars.

The wireless dispatch program will be expanded next year to department planners.

“My goal for this department is to be wireless, paperless and Web-based,” Ladiser said. “That should help the economic recovery, it should help citizens be involved, help with efficiencies and reduce the carbon footprint.”

The department is also working on a pilot program to expedite low-impact developments and is working on requiring LID elements in future permits.