To Get Stuff Built, Get It Processed

From its inception in 1976, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) has required a formal public review, commencing after an application is "certified" as being complete, and mandated to take no more than seven months. However, there was no such mandate for the informal review leading up to certification. This process - "pre-certification" - consisted of an applicant submitting one draft ULURP application after another - a "serial review" (a/k/a "torturing the applicant") - responding to comments from one City Planning division and then to another. There was no timeline, no written guidelines and no one was in charge; every city planner was, in effect, a free agent with equal authority to demand the changes they wanted/preferred, often contradicting the changes demanded by another. Not surprisingly, this process took a very long time - at least a year and sometimes as much as two years.

After years of complaints, in 2013, City Planning instituted the Pre-Application process. Its purpose, first and foremost, was to shorten pre-certification review but also to set standards and delineate specific steps in the process to make it more orderly and predictable. The one thing it did not do, however, was set any time limits similar to those for the formal public review. At first, it worked - sort of. Pre-certification review dropped to maybe nine months, seven if you were lucky, but it gradually crept back up to a year, then more, until, as acknowledged in the report of Mayor Adams' Building and Land Use Approval Streamlining Taskforce (BLAST), "pre-certification... can often [emphasis added] take 2 years before public review in ULURP can begin."

The reasons for this bloat were varied but essentially boiled down to the same problems that afflicted the old process: there were no time limits and no one was in charge.

Here's just one example: the first step in the Pre-Application process is the Informational Interest Meeting (IIM), for which the required materials are basic, including zoning, tax and land use maps and photographs. Requests for an IIM were generally granted on the condition that the required basic materials were submitted any time before the meeting, which was usually held within a couple weeks. The meeting itself was fairly pro forma, often taking no more than a half hour. Last year, I requested an IIM for a project and was told by the borough office that the meeting could not be scheduled unless and until we first submitted the basic materials. OK, fair enough, but when we did, they still refused to schedule the meeting unless and until we submitted plans. So, we submitted a conceptual site plan but were told that this still wasn't enough and that we must submit a full set of detailed plans, including floor plans, sections, elevations and zoning calculations.

Now that all City Planning applications, including Pre-Application Statements, are online only and cannot be submitted unless and until staff opens a "package" on the applications page of its website, we were stuck. We couldn't submit a Pre-Application Statement unless and until we had the IIM - and we couldn't have the IIM unless and until we acceded to the borough office's demand for a full set of plans. But the IIM was never intended to involve a substantive review and analysis of detailed plans, only to "discuss your property and proposal..., zoning, the neighborhood, and any plans affecting property in the project area." The sole purpose of the IIM was to inform the applicant generally as to potential issues and requirements before they spent substantial time and money on a full set of plans.

So it was with some mixed feelings that I recently received an email from City Planning announcing the implementation of one of the recommendations of the BLAST report: "City Planning will review only one draft land use application per project before providing guidance in a comment letter or working meeting and advising the applicant team to file the application when it is ready." This will definitely help, but if the borough offices are still permitted to demand a full set of plans and zoning calculations as a condition of scheduling the IIM - to, in effect, turn the IIM basic materials into a mini-draft ULURP and transform the IIM from a general informational discussion to a substantive review of detailed specifics - it will only do so marginally at the tail end of the Pre-Application process - after the IIM, after the Pre-Application Statement, and after the Interdivisional Meeting at which staff provides comments on the Pre-Application Statement and authorizes submission of a draft ULURP.

To fully address the problem of the Pre-Application process, City Planning needs to return to the original purpose of the IIM: a brief general discussion of information and requirements for a Pre-Application Statement and draft ULURP. Also, someone has to be in charge. There has to be one person empowered to make decisions and move the application forward. Each of the dozen or more staff involved in reviewing any given application cannot individually exercise what amounts to veto power over an application. Finally, and this may be the toughest nut to crack, City Planning staff needs to understand that their goal is not to make the physical application perfect. The "standards" developed in conjunction with the Pre-Application process have calcified into hard-line, no-ifs-ands-or-buts requirements, with the result that way too much time and energy is wasted on picayune details that have nothing whatsoever to do with the substance of the application. The purpose of an application is to provide sufficiently clear and detailed factual information to allow the Planning Commission to make its decision to approve the application (or not). Seasoned practitioners can prepare an application in a matter of months if not weeks. There's no reason it should take a year or more for that application to land on the Planning Commissioners' desks.