Keep permitting under county control

A few years ago, then freshman County Administrator Roman Gastesi announced plans to change the culture in the Monroe County Code Enforcement department.

He was, probably justifiably, concerned that Monroe County’s method of maintaining building and zoning codes was simply to have employees ride around in a car and mail out notices of violation for the overworked special magistrate to handle.

Having done some enforcement work in another life, Gastesi found it probable that exiting the vehicle and simply knocking on a door could probably go a long way toward bringing potential code violations into line.

About a year ago, the vision became public with the change of the code enforcement department to the code compliance department.

However, a name change doesn’t necessarily mean an accomplishment.

There are times Gastesi still finds himself wondering why things have to be so hard in Monroe County for private property owners and local contractors, and why answers to like questions are usually not the same from day to day, desk to desk.

And once he looked deeper, he found some of the same issues in the planning and building departments where permits would languish for weeks, sometimes months, where fees were inconsistently charged, and where answers were different from day to day, desk to desk.

Now, with a few years under his belt, Gastesi has found that progress has been made, but the core problems remain in many instances.

The Growth Management Division, under whose umbrella all of those departments reside, got a new leader last year, and the administrator admits some further progress is being made.

But it’s still not enough to satisfy his vision of a customer-friendly organization.

And it shouldn’t be.

Gastesi has mentioned that to get where he wants the organization to be, out-sourcing might be an option. But only a last-resort option.

We can agree that Monroe County’s building, planning and code compliance staff may have a little too much individual power, with a little too much leeway to interpret the printed word, and a little too little accountability.

We’ve heard more than a decade of horror stories of folks trying to deal with the ever-changing landscape of people, rules and leadership in the growth management division. We’ve heard more than a decade of complaints from local contractors about the difficulty of trying to pry permits from the building department.

We’ve listened to a litany of stories over the last decade about the inconsistencies of decisions made by staff, often resulting in multiple payments for inspections that may or may not have been needed depending on the inspector, the day of the week, the time of the year.

Out-sourcing the operation, however, is probably not a route we would support with any level of enthusiasm. One of our primary problems with out-sourcing is that employees become beholden to the corporate structure, which in turn is beholden to the profits of the corporation.

In many of the stories we’ve heard, the fixes to the issues seemed to be relatively simple, and most boiled down to differing interpretations by differing staff members on the same issue.

That is a lack of oversight and leadership. The leadership is slowly changing. Gastesi seems willing to let the leadership continue to attack the problem.

Oversight can be fixed by simply getting leadership on the same page and not accepting anything except the company line in any circumstance.

Instead of letting an interpretation become a problem, management needs to define the interpretation, and force everyone to use the same interpretation in every instance.

That is the way a corporate out-source would operate. It’s the way things should operate without the need for the Draconian measure of out-sourcing a function that needs to stay answerable to county leadership on a daily basis rather than on a yearly basis at contract renewal time.

Fact finding with out-sourcing as a remote possibility should continue.

But the fix to the problem is tighter control by management and a forced culture change to one where the customer can be right sometimes.

And not everything is a battle to the finish.

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