Permit-streamlining recommendations to be aired; Riordan appointees to deliver their report next month.

The committee appointed by Mayor Richard Riordan to streamline Los Angeles' complicated and confusing development process will deliver its recommendations by mid-August, according to committee chairman Dan Garcia.

"We should be delivering our report to the mayor and the city council within a month," Garcia said in a July 13 phone interview.

Garcia, a longtime local real estate attorney who is a senior vice president at Warner Bros., said the report will include a host of recommendations for simplifying and streamlining Los Angeles' development process.

The recommendations of the Development Reform Committee, which was appointed by Riordan soon after his election, have been long awaited by real estate developers in Los Angeles. The city has one of the worst reputations in the country for its development process, which virtually everyone agrees is a byzantine mess.

Obtaining even simple permits can take months; big projects take years; and eve after developers obtain approvals, they must often contend with conflicting interpretations of regulations by different departments.

Garcia said the committee's specific recommendations will not be made public until it delivers its report to the mayor and the council. However, in general, the recommendations aim to streamline and simplify the entitlement and permitting processes, he said.

"We have to simplify the entitlement process. And we have to make sure that onc you've obtained your entitlements, the permit approval process moves a lot more swiftly than it does now," Garcia said. "We want to identify, task by task, wha ought to happen. We will be recommending standards so there can be an expectation of what will happen and how long it will take."

Garcia's committee was divided into three subcommittees to study the three primary components of the development process: entitlements, administrative processing and permitting, and fees and exactions.

"Entitlements" is a broad general term for the approvals developers must obtain from a municipal government to build a certain type of project -- office, hotel or retail, for example. But once the developer has obtained these entitlements, he or she must still apply for a building permit, a process that can drag on fo months.

Once construction begins, various elements of the building -- such as its foundation, electrical wiring, plumbing, framing, etc. -- must be inspected and approved.

Developers have long complained that during these permitting and inspection processes, different inspectors often give different interpretations of the regulations. Then, at the end of the process, the developer must go through another inspection to obtain a "certificate of occupancy" before the building o buildings can actually be occupied.

Besides being expensive and annoying, developers said, the delays prevent them from responding quickly to market demand.

Garcia said one of the committee's tasks in the next month will be to draft a final report that combines the recommendations of the three subcommittees. "One of the reasons we're still meeting is that we want to eliminate any overlap among the three committees and to make sure that we've all had a chance to sign off on the final package. One reason it has taken us this long is that we are going to make very detailed recommendations," Garcia said.

Although he would not discuss specific recommendations, Garcia explained the type of issues the final report will address. For example, one of the steps tha developers must go through in obtaining approvals is to demonstrate that they will mitigate their project's effect on traffic.

Said Garcia: "The question is, 'Should the planning department, or public works or transportation, or all three of them together, have jurisdiction over this?' That's one of the kinds of questions that has to be answered."

Garcia further said that a developer "ought to be able to know, after one encounter with the city, what has to be done, rather than going through a zonin change hearing and having the planning department say one thing, then going int the permitting process and being told something else by some other department. It's very confusing at the present time."

Real estate attorneys and developers said that sort of inconsistency is one of the biggest problems with the current development process.

"We need decisions made up-front about what kind of development is permitted, and then, once those decisions are made, the amount of discretion at the lower levels should be substantially reduced," said attorney Kenneth Bley, head of th land-use practice at the law firm of Cox, Castle & Nicholson in Century City.

"We shouldn't have to revisit the growth and development policies of the city every time someone wants to build a condominium unit or a four-story office building. But that's what we have now," he said.

According to developers, any streamlining of the city's approval process would be welcome because they also need state and federal approvals on many projects. And state and federal agencies can also be slow to process approvals.

And although developers have come to accept long delays as part of the price of doing business in Los Angeles, those who have been around for a while said it doesn't have to be that way.

Kathleen Zimmerlin de Paz, division vice president for Summa Corp.'s Howard Hughes Center development near Los Angeles International Airport, said the L.A.'s approval process moved much faster in the 1970s -- before the slow-growt and no-growth forces took hold.

According to Zimmerlin de Paz, the Los Angeles city approval process of the 1970s was comparable to the approval process today in Las Vegas. She said Summa builds projects in Las Vegas in a matter of months that would take years in Los Angeles.

Like others, she said she is eagerly looking forward to the recommendations of Garcia's Development Reform Committee.

Whether the committee's recommendations are ever implemented, of course, will b up to Riordan and the city council. Streamlining the development process was on of Riordan's campaign promises. But development is a highly charged political issue, and Riordan must win the council's support if the recommendations are to be approved.

Deputy Mayor Rae James said that once Riordan receives the report, "I would expect the mayor to have a written response prepared within a few weeks to submit to the city council and the planning commission. After that, how fast we move depends on how long it takes the council to act. It also depends on what the recommendations are and whether they need to be reviewed by the city attorney."

From the perspective of the real estate industry, almost any change would be an improvement, sources said.

"I'm not sure we'll be able to eliminate all of the inconsistencies in interpretation," Garcia said. "But to the extent that we can reduce the number of departments that get their fingers on things, we should be able to accomplis our objective."