Episode 204: Hawaii Building Permit Series 2 of 3: People, Permits and PIGs with Dr. Jennifer Salisbury
Summary
How many times have you been invited to something and instantly thought “oh that sounds terrible - I don’t want to do that”? Come on. Be honest. Likely more often than you want to admit. When I saw the three break-out groups of the SPEED Task Force, that’s exactly what I thought… But then it occurred to me that this service wasn’t about me. It was about the people who didn’t have a voice or a seat at the table. But I do. That’s when I knew I had to volunteer - against my inner voice - to serve on all three groups. These are called PIGs, which is short for Permitted Interaction Groups, all in efforts to help simplify building permits in the State of Hawaii. In today’s episode, which is the second installment of a 3-part series, I screenshare what the PIGs are all about, what the Counties had to report about the building permit problems, and my 20 recommendations I put forward to help the awkward conversations.
Resource Links:
Task Force Link SPEED Task Force Info
Task Force Presentation from SHPD/Jessica Puff Preserving and Protecting Hawaii’s Historic Identity through Architecture, Archaeology, and History and Culture
Task Force Presentation from DOH/Jon N 2025_DOH_Wastewater_Branch.pdf
Big Island Presentation Hawaii County Building Permit Process.pdf
Kauai Presentation 2025_Kauai_Permit_Process.pdf
DPP link for Presentation DBEDT Trends in Honolulu Building Permits 2005-2024.pdf
Recommendation/SWOT 2025_STF_Recommendation_and_SWOT_Form.pd
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This Week’s Blog Post:
Welcome to My Life As A Landlord, where we educate curious US and Canadian landlords, answer rental questions, and clear up confusions about all things housing. I'm your host, Doctor Jennifer Salisbury. Last week was the first episode in a series that I have created to educate you on what special groups I've gotten myself involved with, namely the Small Business Regulatory Review Board and then the SPEED Task Force. Today is episode two in the series of three, and I'm going to zero in on who in these groups we're actually trying to help, how we're helping them.
Simple and Sophisticated People and Permits
The people in my mind are simple and sophisticated. When we're talking about building permit applications, they're either simple applicants, meaning they're only going to apply for one building permit their entire life, and unfortunately most of Lahaina rebuilding is a simple applicant and they're traumatized quite frankly. Then you've got sophisticated applicants who are people like me, people who have done more than one building permit that are regularly applying or around this industry. But it also depends on what you're trying to build, so the permit that you're applying for is also simple and sophisticated. A simple permit I would say is a single family home, maybe new construction, nothing major triggered, not near one of the coastlines, not in the SMA, no coastal zone management. The worst part is that you have simple applicants with sophisticated permits, and that's where everybody gets really confused with a lot of miscommunication.
The Three PIGs and Their Weekly Meetings
The three PIGs are building permit, SHIP-D which is the State Historic Preservation PIG also known as Chapter 6E, and individual wastewater systems or Department of Health DOH. They met weekly for about seven weeks every week, at least one hour, most of them were 2 or 3 hours, and I served on all three of these. The SHIP-D PIG had 6-13 members, and Jessica Poff who is the deputy director gave a presentation explaining why this is even in Hawaii. One of the biggest things that everyone said across the board in all of the counties was that the submittals are so either incomplete or low quality that it takes time to go back to the applicant to say we need more information. The Department of Health PIG consists of 13 members, and a lot of discussion was about the cesspool conversions with over 86,000 cesspools in the state of Hawaii that are mandated to be converted to septic or something else by 2050.
County Presentations and Building Permit Trends
I'm going to reference three presentations that were given at the original September 11th meeting at the state Capitol. The Big Island uses Epic Electronic Processing and Information Center and they issue one permit for building electrical and plumbing all in one, so they call this one bite at the apple. Kauai also did a presentation about how they work, and they were actually the first one to be online completely online in the state of Hawaii. The County of Honolulu reported additional frustrating factors for building permits such as code changes and ordinance changes, and the backlog of building permits by month since 2010 shows that over the last 15 years the backlog has gotten worse. The biggest comment that everybody made everywhere was the staff shortages, that the cost of living in the state of Hawaii regardless of the location has people fighting over skilled employees.
My 20 Recommendations to the Task Force
They asked all of the board members to create recommendations using a SWOT analysis with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I created a total of 20 recommendations, and every time when there was a recommendation I would research where this has already been done or where they're actively fighting this. For example, Long Island's Suffolk County New York has cesspools just like the state of Hawaii and they are fighting a cesspool conversion just like Hawaii, so I reached out to Long Island and said why aren't we comparing notes. Some of my recommendations included keep Hawaii families together in Hawaii, third party assistant for a fee, put staff first and make it a better working place, create a 30 day application clock, standardized forms templates and checklists, one collective building permit for building electrical and plumbing, implement AI for automatic calculations and general plan checks, and incentives for homeowners to convert cesspools.
What's Coming Next Week
Today's episode was all about the people, namely the people who are involved both on the task force itself but who's impacted by whatever the result of this task force is—simple, sophisticated lawmakers, staff, building permit applicants of all time. I reviewed the most updated information about the task force including the updated SPEED Task Force presentation, and I did a deeper dive on who is behind all of the Permitted Interaction Groups. I also reviewed the 20 recommendations that I submitted as a part of my role on the task force, and all of these are hyperlinked in the show notes if you want to know more. In the last episode in next week's series, I'll review the final report and recommendation back to the task force from each of the PIGs, go through Maui County's presentation which is quite extensive, and show you what the thing called MAPS looks like which is the program that you submit for building permits on Maui. Real estate takes you places. Where do you want real estate to take you?