Honolulu Mayor: Building Permit Office Will Speed Up With AI

Applicants should start seeing a difference soon, the mayor says, thanks to new technology.

Honolulu will start issuing building permits faster this fall with the help of technological upgrades, including artificial intelligence, Mayor Rick Blangiardi said at a Civil Beat event on Tuesday. 

The Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting has long struggled to keep up with a backlog of applications for residential and commercial renovations and new builds. Applicants regularly wait months or even years for permission to start construction, and the total permitting time — from application to issuance — has ballooned to record-breaking levels in recent years. 

At a Q&A about Civil Beat’s Permit Pileup series, during which he touched on some of the reasons for delays, the mayor said conditions should improve within six months.

“By the end of this year, you’re going to be able to get a permit here as fast as anywhere,” he said. “We’re not just interested in eliminating the backlog. We’re not. We’re interested in establishing an entirely new standard.” 

DPP says it is already reviewing plans much faster than it used to, but property owners aren’t necessarily feeling that.

It took 252 days to get a residential permit in the first quarter of this year — or more than eight months — based on a Civil Beat analysis of the median permitting time. That’s slightly better than 2024 but much longer than the 38 days it took in 2019. 

The median wait for commercial job permits was 393 days, more than a year – a 20% increase over 2024 and an apparent all-time high. 

DPP says it is doing reviews more quickly, but staff are doing more rounds of review for each application. The agency has also pointed blame at applicants themselves, including design professionals who take their time responding to DPP’s comments on building plans. 

Asked to respond to the data on Tuesday, Blangiardi said the trend will stabilize by next year. 

“Sometimes in order to fix something, things get worse before they get better,” the mayor said. “Everybody said this problem could not be fixed. Everybody. And we’re fixing it. And we’re almost there.”

Promises Include Tech Upgrades

Technological upgrades are on the way. The city’s late-1990s-era software system — the mayor pointed out that it predated the iPhone by nine years — will be replaced with a program called Clariti which the city has described as a user-friendly platform to guide applicants through the permit process. 

Another program called CivCheck will use artificial intelligence to scan building plans for code compliance. Both are scheduled to go live in September, the mayor said. 

The technology should help address complaints that employees make inconsistent or outright incorrect interpretations of the building code, according to the mayor. 

“Electronically, you’re going to know everything is solid before it gets to a human review,” Blangiardi said. 

Part of the problem with DPP is an excess of regulations, Blangiardi said. The mayor of San Francisco this year proposed a set of reforms to eliminate building codes that “no longer make sense,” the San Francisco Chronicle has reported. Asked about that during the Civil Beat event, Blangiardi said he’s interested in a similar effort here, although he didn’t specify any particular rules he would try to repeal.  

“We’ve got a lot of rules that don’t make sense,” the mayor said. 

Blangiardi also said some employees get a power trip from nitpicking applicants’ building plans, including one staffer who demanded to know the weight of dumbbells a property owner was going to put in his home gym. That needs to change, he said.  

“We’re trying to change a culture,” he said. 

In the meantime, improvements already implemented have made a difference, Blangiardi said. With the help of a computerized tool, the city was able to cut down the time for prescreen — a cursory check for formatting issues — from six months to one or two days. 

The city has improved its recruitment and hiring practices too, the mayor noted. It used to take six months to bring someone on board, he said, but that can now happen almost instantly. 

During the event on Tuesday, the mayor also spoke about weak enforcement for violators of the building code, including short-term vacation rental owners and home flippers who renovate properties without the proper permits. The mayor said he would like to see DPP go after violators more aggressively. The city has allowed some scofflaws to accrue huge fines that never get collected, he said, and therefore get ignored. 

“I’m a person that says we all should live by the rules. That helps everybody,” he said. “If there’s no consequence, it becomes meaningless… It’s been a source of frustration for me, once I became aware, and we’re getting better at it.”

The mayor acknowledged applicants’ frustration with the permitting process but assured the audience that a better system is right around the corner. 

“Just be patient. Just a little bit more,” he said. “We hear you.”