At his “State of the City” address to Council today, the Mayor of Pittsburgh proposed a reorganization of the City’s permitting process by pulling the Bureau of Building Inspection out of the Department of Public Safety (where it is currently with Police, Fire, Emergency Medical Services, and Animal Control) and make it into its own department called “Permits, Licenses, and Inspections”.
According to the Act 47 recovery plan the BBI currently has 76 employees and is organized into three divisions (construction and engineering, code enforcement, and condemnation and demolition).
This action, if approved by Council, would be similar to other reorganizations of existing departments in City and County government. The County in the past few years split Public Works and parts of Administrative Services into a Facilities Management Department, and recently the Department of Real Estate was folded into the Department of Administrative Services.
The goal of the city’s reorganization is geared toward making the permit process more user-friendly; a July article pointed out that the Bureau was using pen and paper and an effort to modernize operations was coming along quite slowly.
