Andrew Adelman’s most notable accomplishment during his decade-long run as general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety is arguably that he has improved the permitting process and generally made his department more user friendly. The guest speaker of the Sept. 18 Livable Communities meeting at the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, Adelman, among other issues, spoke about how Building and Safety has shifted from being a regulator to a facilitator in recent years. “We have done a lot of things to improve customer service in building and safety,” Adelman told the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. “Among those is creating five one-stop permit centers, including one in Van Nuys, which handles over a half a million walk-in customers per year, and the average wait time is less than 12 minutes.” Adelman went on to say that the department has also improved the turnaround for plan checks, so that projects are reviewed more quickly. “And the third thing is that we have 99.9 percent of inspections done within 24 hours. That is compared to previously when people had to wait four or five days for inspectors.” San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center head Daniel Blake attended the Livable Communities meeting and did not hold back his praise for the changes the Department of Building and Safety has made. “The progress that Building and Safety is making in terms of turning this stuff around it’s really about time,” he declared. “Time is money to a developer. One of the things that pushes development out of the City of Los Angeles and into nearby communities is the roadblocks put up by the permitting process. Anything we in Los Angeles can do in fast-tracking this process will make development cheaper and easier and a lot less frustrating and ultimately will attract the right kind of development. Cutting down inspection times, permit times, being a whole lot more user friendly all that part was good.” For some attendees of the Livable Communities meeting, however, Adelman’s talk raised questions and concerns. Bob Scott, a past president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, in addition to being founding chair of the Valley Economic Alliance, director of the Mulholland Institute and chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, had questions about Adelman’s discussion of the limitations being placed on hillside construction. “My thoughts on that would be it doesn’t help our housing requirement on the Regional Housing Needs Assessment to have fewer and fewer places where you can build housing,” Scott said. “My question would be by making it more difficult for people to build, doesn’t that frustrate the goal of increased housing and make housing more expensive.” Adelman thinks otherwise, though. “We have put limits or carefully regulated hillside construction, so that it does not impact the safety of the hillside and minimizes the impact of the quality of life of residents,” he said. “For example, anytime there is hillside construction, and it costs an essential amount of importing or exporting, it goes to the public safety board and during those public hearings, neighborhood councils can express their views.” Vic Viereck, a certified public accountant, realtor and apartment owner, who sits on the board of directors of the Universal City-North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, agrees that limitations need to be placed on such construction. “When you’ve got hillside homes, street space is pretty limited,” he said. “As far as density, if they put up bigger buildings with less parking per unit, we might have a worse problem.” Adelman is adamant that placing limits on hillside construction won’t cut down on housing development. “We’re asking them to be considerate of their neighbors,” he explained of the regulations. “We are not stopping them. We are setting work within frameworks in terms of the construction, so it does not stop construction. It’s just in the most extreme circumstances. Plus, the number of dwellings in hillside construction is very limited. The mass dwellings of housing are provided by multifamily dwellings not multimillion dollar homes in the hillside areas.” While Viereck agrees that limitations need to be placed on hillside construction, he’s concerned about regulations placed on housing. “Apartments are regularly inspected to make sure things are kept up to code,” he said. But “the rent stabilization makes it difficult to comply with some regulations.” Two issues Adelman did not discuss in detail or at all during the meeting were the controversy surrounding the building of a Home Depot in Sunland and outdated city codes, both of which he said were in the Planning Department’s domain. “The Home Depot issue is purely a planning issue,” he said, explaining that the Department of Building and Safety had no choice but to revoke the permit it initially issued to the project because the Planning Department had revoked its approval. “In order for us to issue the permit for Home Depot we need to have the approval of the Planning Department,” Adelman explained. As for the code needing to be updated, Adelman said that “what is outdated is the zoning code written by Planning. The building code is updated every three years. We’re in the process of updating the building code. Every three years like clockwork during my tenure in the City of Los Angeles, the building code has been updated three times. The zoning code has not been updated in 60 years.”