Everyone from residents building decks to developers constructing shopping malls will have a simplified process for figuring out what permit fee they'll have to pay the Carroll County Bureau of Permits and inspections.
The Carroll County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved streamlining the county's current building permit fee process on Thursday. The new permit fee process will be implemented Aug. 1.
When a permit is processed, several calculations must be performed and questions must be asked in order to determine the fee, according to Carroll County Code Inspector Jason Green. The streamlined building process reduces the number of steps for commercial properties from five to two and for residential properties from three to two, Green said.
Starting in August, people will only have to determine the gross square footage of a project and multiply that number by the new square foot cost multiplier to get the permit fee. While the new process helps builders easily calculate their fee before paying for the permit, Green said it also helps county employees quickly determine the fee without having to ask a lot of questions.
The permit fee structure has also changed, with some fees going up and others going down. Determining which fees have gone up and down is difficult, Green said, because it varies between individual projects with specific square footage.
"It's hard to put a figure to," Green said. "There's a lot of complexities within the current system. This is just a way of smoothing things out."
The goal of the change, he said, was to make the new process revenue neutral for the county. Green used permit data from 2010, 2011 and 2012 to explain the effect the new fee structure would have on county revenues.
The new fee structure would have brought in $5,339 less in 2010, $2,700 more in 2011 and $35,694 more in 2012 compared to the current fee structure. The increase in 2012 was due to the increase in commercial building permits, Green said.
Commissioner Doug Howard, R-District 5, said developers and builders have told him they would rather pay a higher permit fee if it moves the process forward quicker.
Green said it will take less time for the county to determine a building permit fee, but the new process will not make a significant impact on moving the building process along.
