At Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting, the taxpayers get what they pay for. 

The beleaguered department, which is drowning in more permit applications than it can process, is getting by on the backs of a low-wage workforce with high turnover. Among those whose job is to review building plans, most have salary ranges that fall within the federal definition of “low income” in Honolulu, a review of DPP’s salary data shows. 

The minimum starting salary for a plans examiner is $39,816, less than the advertised pay for a housekeeper at the Aulani resort. Many DPP employees hold second jobs to make ends meet, DPP Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna said in an interview. Some have told her they could make the same amount working at Starbucks. 

“At least at Starbucks you get free coffee and happy customers,” Takeuchi Apuna said.

It’s no surprise then that the department has a tough time recruiting and finds it challenging to hang on to the employees it does have. As of last month, the department had a 24% vacancy rate. 

A third of Honolulu’s building plans examiners turned over in the last year alone, the department said, meaning that a significant portion of these critical roles are often occupied by people who are new to the job. New hires don’t need to have any experience or knowledge of building plans when they walk in the door. All they need is a high school diploma or GED. 

As new workers get up to speed, the workload falls behind. 

The lack of staffing is part of a triad of problems keeping Honolulu permitting slow, Takeuchi Apuna said: people, processes and technology. While the director is making progress in two of those areas – implementing standard operating procedures and upgrading antiquated computer systems – giving out raises is above the director’s pay grade. 

That would be something Mayor Rick Blangiardi would have to negotiate with the employees’ union. In an interview, Blangiardi acknowledged that the pay for building plans examiners is not competitive. But the mayor indicated there are no immediate plans to raise pay for those positions.

Blangiardi said workers – young people in particular – are looking for more in a workplace than just money. They’re looking for a comfortable work-life balance, he said, including the ability to work remotely and with flexible hours, the latter of which the city is exploring. Besides, he said, the city doesn’t have the means to offer raises.

“Is money necessary? Absolutely,” he said. “But you seem to think all we’ve got to do is drop a bunch of money on the table, and people are going to say ‘I’ll take it.’ It doesn’t work that way … It’s much more complex than that.”

At a Civil Beat event last month, Blangiardi acknowledged fixing DPP was one of his core campaign promises. When he was running for office in 2020, delays were a major concern, with residential plans taking an average of about 140 days to issue and commercial jobs taking more than 280 days.

But the issue has only become more dire during Blangiardi’s time in office. As of January of this year, the average residential permit application takes six months to process, according to DPP. Commercial projects typically take more than a year. In both categories, permit approvals are taking 10 times as long as they did in the early 2000s, DPP data shows.

Now running for reelection, the mayor said the city is laying a foundation that will make a difference over time.

For instance, he said his proposed budget for the 2025 fiscal year will include raises for engineers, which the administration hopes will speed up reviews of commercial plans. But engineers don't work on residential plans, which consistently represent the bulk of DPP's backlog.

“Nobody said it was going to get done in the first four years,” Blangiardi said. 

Meanwhile, the unprecedented permitting review times are having far-reaching impacts on the island. 

Permit applicants say their applications seem to fall into a black hole and may not emerge for months, or in some cases, years. Many have reported prolonged back-and-forth communications with inexperienced examiners whose comments, applicants say, are unfounded or unnecessary.

The backlog is a drag on construction companies that say the city’s glacial pace limits their job opportunities and slows the development of much-needed housing. And it’s maddening to businesses and homeowners who say they’re bleeding money in mortgage payments, taxes and storage costs as they wait for the city’s blessing to build or renovate their properties. 

The “disaster” of DPP is not going to get better until the staffing issue is addressed, according to Jim Hayden, a union shop steward who has worked for DPP for more than 20 years.

He said for many people, the salaries being offered are “a nonstarter.”

“Dawn’s heart is in the right place, and she’s doing the best you can,” Hayden said of his boss. “But it's always been a tendency in our department to look for a technological solution to what is really a management and a personnel problem.” 

A 'Political Will Issue'

Raising salaries in a substantial way would require negotiations with the Hawaii Government Employees Association. 

HGEA’s collective bargaining agreements govern many of Hawaii’s county and state workers – including those in DPP – such that workers with the same job duties earn roughly the same. That means a building plans examiner in Honolulu has to make about the same as a similarly situated person in Kahului. 

The jobs are tethered by salary ranges in which employees can get step increases based on experience. Employers can’t just decide to pay everyone on their staff at the top of the pay range.  

The union agreement is voted on every few years by the county mayors and the state. Each county gets one vote. The state gets four. 

The goal is to promote fairness, according to Ted Hong, a Hilo-based labor attorney who was Gov. Linda Lingle’s chief labor negotiator. Without it, Honolulu, which has the largest tax base, could pay significantly more than the neighbor island counties, creating an unbalanced situation, Hong said.

However, it also means employers don’t have the independent authority to make compensation decisions in response to the local job market. 

“This hinders the city’s ability to quickly, and unilaterally, offer salary or benefit adjustments for key civil service positions in order to compete with the private sector and fill city vacancies,” a 2023 Honolulu audit report found. 

Takeuchi Apuna has pointed to the union rules as an obstacle to raises for her staff. But there are ways around it.

Employers can negotiate with the union to “reprice” a class of employees outside of the usual collective bargaining process, Hong said. And in the short term, employers can negotiate supplemental collective bargaining agreements that apply only to certain workers. 

In either case, Blangiardi would have to talk to HGEA, Hong said. 

“It’s not a collective bargaining issue or a contract issue,” he said. “It’s a political will issue. This problem could be addressed in three months if it were truly a priority.”  

Indeed, the administration has already been negotiating with HGEA to raise pay for city workers, but not for building plan reviewers. Instead, the administration is focused on increasing salaries for engineering jobs citywide – including DPP, which has a significant shortage.

There is good reason to raise engineers' pay. A city audit in 2023 found them to be vastly underpaid compared to their private sector counterparts, and DPP relies on them to review complex commercial plans, which take the longest to review and approve. 

However, DPP’s engineers don’t work on the residential jobs that represent the majority of DPP’s workload.

The city has also offered a boost – called a shortage differential – to engineers and building inspectors, but the inspectors don’t impact the approval of permit applications. They typically examine job sites once construction has been permitted to start or is already complete.

Pay for plans examiners could possibly be renegotiated down the line, according to Honolulu Managing Director Mike Formby, but he didn’t say when. City officials said on Tuesday they completed a salary study on building plans examiner pay to justify salary increases but did not immediately share a copy with Civil Beat.

Correction: The Honolulu human resources department said late last year that the city had not ordered a salary study for plans examiners. City officials on Tuesday said a study had, in fact, been done.  

DPP said it is exploring the possibility of rewriting job descriptions to better capture the duties of workers in way that would justify higher pay. A consultant's report on that subject is expected in June.

However, changing job descriptions would also require negotiations with the union, Hong said.

Meanwhile, DPP is working on contracting out the responsibilities of plans reviewers. With the union’s blessing, the city will hire between eight and 20 trained reviewers on contract to help with the backlog for about a year, Takeuchi Apuna said. 

“That’s going to be a temporary fix while we try to hire, while we get the new permitting software, AI, et cetera. It’s going to be a big help,” she said. “We're not trying to replace anybody. We're just trying to augment and make it easier for our current staff because they are overloaded.” 

According to Formby, the union gave its OK for the city to privatize some of its work on the condition that the city would reconsider some of the salaries in DPP. 

"Moving the needle on salaries in a city with 10,000 employees is not something that happens overnight," Formby said.

Randy Perreira, the president of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, declined to be interviewed for this story. 

As it is now, the constant turnover among plans examiners means DPP has less and less of the institutional knowledge that used to move permit applications along more quickly, Hayden said. And managers now have to help review plans while trying to train a steady stream of new employees. 

“If they can't get the guys up to speed and they constantly start from square one, it's putting a drag on the resources,” he said. 

‘There’s Only So Fast You Can Go’ 

Formby said the administration deserves credit for its hard work on a complex issue.

“We're doing our best," he said. "We're giving it 150%.”

The managing director and mayor said that after the pandemic, many jurisdictions have had challenges sustaining their workforces for reasons beyond pay. Employers statewide are finding it tough to find workers nowadays with an unemployment rate of less than 3%, the mayor noted. 

To address workers’ desire for scheduling flexibility, the city piloted a program to allow some, including those in DPP, to work four days a week, 10 hours a day. 

“To some employees, that makes a difference,” Formby said. 

The mayor noted that Honolulu’s human resources department has also made strides in speeding up its hiring processes, which previously took six months. And he said progress has been made in processing solar permits after the city decided to prioritize them.

The mayor said the city is investing in technology upgrades for DPP, and he has made an effort to listen to feedback from construction industry professionals.

“These are all things you do that systemically improve something that's been broken for a long time,” Blangiardi said. 

The mayor said he feels the pressure to improve the system. 

“We have the understanding of its relevance to an economic recovery in a post-Covid environment,” he said. “There’s only so fast you can go.”