Who Will Answer the Call?

By Ted McIntyre

At the same time the industry is trying to fill the void of skilled trades, public-sector staffing issues are just as worrisome

After being informed by a senior public employee that the Regional Municipality of Peel was significantly short-staffed—due in part to the fallout from the previously proposed dissolution of the region—I thought I’d call their media person to confirm, or at least obtain whatever numbers they would provide.

So I phoned the media number. The first person to pick up laughed at the idea that they were down 50% staff, then said they’d connect me to the right individual. But then I ended up back at the front of the voicemail line. I navigated my way back to the main operator, who tried to reconnect me with the media line, which, after a minute or two, looped back to the operator. 

“Hello, Region of Peel.”

Recognizing her voice, I asked, “Wasn’t I just speaking with you?” “Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure what happened. Let’s try this again.” 

So she tried again. I was put on hold, eventually connecting to a voicemail: “Bethany Lee, Region of Peel,” which was immediately followed by, “This mailbox is full.” I was then looped back into the automated chain, with a prompt to “Press 0” for the operator, which I did. “No personal operator is available,” the automated voice informed.  

Seconds later—and this is the best part—I was connected to a voicemail survey asking how my call went. 

Getting lost in the labyrinth of automated attendants is nothing new for any industry. But making connections with the public sector these days is tougher than usual. While the residential construction industry is acutely aware of the imposing shortage of skilled trades, that same ‘silver tsunami’ of retiring professionals, from City of Toronto Chief Planner Gregg Lintern on down, is sweeping over building and planning offices throughout the province.

“I am a professional planner, and half of my industry colleagues are in the private sector, and half are in the public sector, and I can tell you most planning departments don’t have a couple of vacancies; they have tons of vacancies,” stresses West End Home Builders’ Association CEO Mike Collins-Williams. 

“For better or worse, the entire housing system, whether it’s technical building code components or land-use planning, has become increasingly complex over the past couple of decades,” Collins-Williams says. “On the private sector side, that requires our members to have more staff or to hire more consultants, leading to increased costs. But you have the same issues on the public sector side. A lot of the focus has been on the skilled trades, but there’s a shortage of building department officials—people to process applications or put together long-range plans, zoning bylaws, strategic planning. And the shortage puts upward pressure on salaries on both the private and public sides. It’s difficult for municipalities to attract and retain talent. The best and brightest in the planning world are sometimes poached from municipalities to work for private-sector planning firms. And then what’s left behind? Young staff are being promoted faster than they should be, lacking experience, lacking leadership.”

“Due to retirements and staff choosing other opportunities to advance their careers outside of the organization, I’d estimate about a 50% staff turnover since the beginning of the pandemic,” says Brynn Nheiley, Executive Director of Community Planning, Regulation and Mobility at the City of Burlington. “Despite turnover, we have a strong culture of succession planning to minimize gaps in service delivery.”

Molinaro Group President Vince Molinaro would beg to differ. “I know maybe 10 who have retired since the pandemic started,” Molinaro says. “I could always find someone in engineering or the traffic person—people who knew we have a good reputation and who could get things cleared up and approved based on that relationship. Finding these people in key positions is proving more difficult than in the past, as is getting timely responses.”

Has Molinaro poached anyone from the public sector to bolster his staff? “The reverse,” he says. “One of our younger, dynamic site guys left to go work for the City of Burlington. I think some of it might have had to do with their benefits package, while also getting to work from home one day a week.”

The Home Office

Mention of work-from-home sends a nail-loosening shudder through the building community. Whether it’s the new generation of employees or the new system, “work-from-home is not working in planning departments,” Collins-Williams says with conviction. “Some staff are fantastic and are carrying more than their fair share of the load, and some are doing what they need to do, but others are falling between the cracks, not being properly mentored and not doing the work. And the problem for municipalities is that you can now have somebody living in Hamilton and working for the Ottawa or the Halifax planning department. And if those planning departments try forcing staff back to the office, those staff say, ‘OK, I’ll quit. There are lots of openings elsewhere.’ Because all the power rests with the employees who want a flexible schedule.”

Municipalities, meanwhile, are defending the new norm—publicly, anyway. “Staff enjoy the option of working from home, and it’s easy to measure because we know how many permits they’ve reviewed or issued,” indicates Kitchener Chief Building Official Mike Seiling, who believes many are actually working longer hours by avoiding commuting. Half of the Kitchener’s 10 plan examiners currently work from home, which will be limited to two days a week as of this spring.

“The City of Burlington has a robust hybrid work environment with modernized technology so that staff may work from home as effectively as they work in-person,” says Nheiley. 

Brendan Charters, Development Manager at Eurodale Design + Build, disagrees. “Nobody in an office environment is as efficient working from home—many studies speak to this. Municipalities tend to be quite siloed to begin with, so even when people are in the office, if your smaller file requires approvals of four or five different departments, there is nobody to shepherd things around. So it’s still incumbent upon the applicant to move it from one department to another. But what you are losing with work-from-home is a little bit of that managerial oversight, where you can walk up to somebody’s desk to see if they’re busy and ask them to prioritize a file.”

While the digitization of some procedures has helped, the file still needs to be picked up and run with at the other end, notes Charters. “What used to take a day of standing at City Hall to make a submission now takes you a couple clicks of a mouse. But then it can take up to two weeks to even have a file in-taken by a clerk and to be advised of the fees to pay. And while you can pay your fees right away, the clock doesn’t start ticking on these legislative review timeframes until the fees are collected. So at the municipal level, it really depends on whose desk your file lands on.”

Charters has seen how some of those files can draw dust. “We had been working months on approval processes with Metrolinx and encroachment permits for a project. All the I’s were dotted and T’s crossed, and we’d sent it back to the examiner before Christmas. In February, I received an email reply: ‘I was off, and now I’m back and will be looking at it in the order of when submissions came in.’ And I was like, ‘Hey, everything was given to you over a month ago, where we had to jump through all these hoops. Can you please just rubber stamp this and get it off your desk? I have tenants who moved out and a customer trying to carry this bridge financing, and I have trades ready to work.’ She wrote back an email describing the benefits of a vacation for mental health and that she believes in fairness and that it should be reviewed in the order it came in. And I was like, ‘OK, management/director/CBO—reassign this file! Thankfully, they did reassign it, and the permit was issued right away. 

“I understand if people need a mental break or vacation, but if somebody is off for four or six weeks, somebody else has to review your files,” Charters says. “There are timeframes in the building code and the Planning Act. It doesn’t say ‘10 days, except if the person is on vacation!’”

Talent Search

Charters appreciates staffing challenges, especially given that the approach to work seems to have changed for many since the pandemic. “People’s give-a-shit metre is at an all-time low. And that’s with every company, the world over,” he says. “We also see it in the trades—the quality of work four years ago was totally different than what we’re seeing in many instances today. And so for companies like ourselves, who sell a certain quality level to our clients, it is immensely stressing.”  

Good help is so hard to find that City of Greater Sudbury’s Director of Building Services and Chief Building Official Guido Mazza has heard numerous complaints of Southern Ontario municipalities luring talent away from each other. Charters has witnessed it personally. “When interest rates were really low, application rates in bedroom communities like Barrie, Guelph and Durham region exploded,” Charters notes. “The market being what it is, all these plan examiners and planners from the City of Toronto got poached with higher salaries and were lured by more inexpensive housing out there. So we suffered here locally in Toronto.”

“In Kitchener, we’ve had a lot of experienced people retire over the past five years—a few as a result of the Pandemic, but also a portion of baby boomers hitting retirement age who have been in the business for 30+ years, people with a lot of institutional knowledge in their heads, and you can’t capture all that,” says Seiling. “They’ve been replaced with new people, but recruitment currently has its challenges.” 

To cast the recruitment net, Kitchener’s building department is working with Conestoga College and is planning to present to local high schools in May. It also partnered with the Ontario Building Officials Association (OBOA) on an internship program that will allow the City to hire new recruits who are not fully qualified and, if required, terminate interns who don’t get provincially qualified within a certain timeframe—something that required union support, a significant barrier for most if not all Ontario municipal building departments. 

Sudbury recognized the coming retirement wave and took its own pre-emptive measures. “We initiated a process two years ago—a modified internship program with the support of our CAO—bringing in individuals who met the minimum requirements, with training and experience to be gleaned from the people they’ll be replacing sometime later this year,” says Mazza, who himself plans to retire within the foreseeable future. 

Mazza’s staff is also working with the OBOA and community colleges such as George Brown, College Boreal, Cambrian and Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture to raise the profile of the building officials profession. The OBOA, for its part, has launched a new Inspectors Technique Suite of online courses providing practical skills to help new building inspectors transition to their new role, while also offering tips for seasoned building officials.

OHB magazine attempted to solicit comments from the OBOA for this story via email and voicemail, but—perhaps exemplifying the challenges of communicating with the planning sector—neither message was returned.

Positive Steps

While the talent search continues, some regions are taking steps to improve the efficiency of their services. Of the 12 municipalities in the Niagara Region, Niagara Falls may be the most well-oiled machine, suggests Matt Vartanian, Director of Land Development at Mountainview Building Group.

“From a Planning and Development perspective, they’re doing their best to stick to the prescribed Planning Act timelines. And when Niagara Falls sends us their comments, it’s a coordinated and collaborative response. They’ve communicated with all applicable departments, so you’re typically not getting new or contradicting comments afterward. The lack of surprises later in the planning process is crucial for all parties involved. We understand that’s a challenge and sometimes out of the municipality’s control, as they all experience changes in councils, as well as staff turnover where someone needs to pick up the review of a development application midway through the process. However, if it’s coordinated in the early stages, we have time to work through any issues that might arise.”

Welland, for its part, has far exceeded its 2023 housing target and is excellent when it comes to response times, Vartanian adds. “If I call their planning department, I get a call back within a couple days at the latest. And the Town of Fort Erie is another municipality taking steps in the right direction.”

In Sudbury, “inspection requests are taken care of within 24 hours where the mandated timeline is 24 hours,” Mazza declares. “And with respect to turnaround on houses, we’re pretty close to meeting our mandated times.”

Beyond introducing e-permitting, Sudbury has also created a one-stop development desk for front-arriving customers of engineering, planning and building for all development applications. They’ve further implemented a Development Dashboard—a one-stop location for information about residential, industrial, commercial and institutional development throughout Sudbury, updated quarterly.

“On the digital side, we work with our IT group to ensure that any of the pain points are addressed,” says Mazza. “It’s set up so that after you work through the system, you can provide us anonymous feedback on your experience, whether it was the inspection, your plans examination, etc. We encourage that feedback so that we can adjust our processes if necessary.”

In Kitchener, the average time between site plan pre-submission consultation and receiving approval-in-principle has been reduced from 335 days to 133 since 2019, according to Kitchener’s Director of Planning, Rosa Bustamante. The City’s proactive measures include an annual free industry workshop hosted by building staff to help expedite the approval processes and inform customers. And while he admits Gen Y’s and Z’s are more inclined to communicate digitally than verbally, “We’re encouraging our staff to create relationships with customers,” Seiling says. “You can do business over the phone, in person and at the building department counter. It’s hard to create a relationship through an email, and you can read tone and context through email.”

There are also many signs of encouragement out of Burlington. “On one hand, Burlington has been lagging behind other Ontario municipalities with respect to hitting their housing starts target. On the other hand, the City is really trying, with several initiatives underway that will help produce results in 2025, 2026 and beyond,” says Collins-Williams. “The mayor’s office and a number of councillors recognize that they need to do better, and they have engaged the industry—in particular the West End Home Builders’ Association—in robust and positive discussions on what needs to change and how we can all work together to do better.”

Those innovations include the Community Planning Permit System focusing on Burlington’s three GO Station areas. “It’s a development review process that combines the zoning bylaw amendment, site plan and minor variance applications into one streamlined process,” explains Nheiley. Burlington has also “completed a proof-of-concept experiment using AI tools to help applicants with their zoning review and support more complete and accurate applications, reducing the need for revisions.” A transformation of its pre-building approval process for developments that are exempt from Site Plan Approval has sped up building permit applications from an average of 17 weeks to five and a half weeks, says Nheiley, who also notes that Burlington has also installed a team of 15 at its new first-floor multi-department development counter in City Hall. Further, a High-Impact Criteria measure was implemented last year, with a dedicated staff member steering the client from pre-consultation through to building occupancy.  

This, however, is news to Molinaro, who has not seen evidence of quickening timelines. “We’ve waited three years for zoning approval on our Brant and Ghent sites. It could probably be three or four towers and around 1,000 units.”

On the other hand, Molinaro is thrilled with the processing pace of a new venture west of Burlington. 

“We’re going back to Hamilton for the first time in 20 years. It will be one of the first Bill 23 More Homes Built Faster developments, with the accelerated timelines and approval processes. We put in for two 12-storey towers, 384 units, and we got approved in 11 months, which is ridiculously fast. We had the buy-in from Mayor Horvath, local councillor Matt Francis, staff—everybody working and communicating. We have a deep pipeline of sites in Burlington to deal with, but the process was so good in Hamilton that we have other sites there we’re definitely considering.”  

Making Life Easier

And what do municipalities yearn for? Bracing for more than 2,400 technical code changes due to the upcoming National Building Code harmonization, Seiling longs for the days when “the building and development branch at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing issued written code interpretations and a bulletin two to three times a year explaining the intent of the code, with small diagrams that could be used as tools to educate the industry, from builders to building officials. But they haven’t done that in 10+ years. At the same time, we have experienced people who’ve been around for a long time, who had practical knowledge and understood the intent of the code, being replaced by new people who don’t have that experience yet. And the Ministry does not offer the outreach to inform and educate like it previously did.”

What can builders do if the goal is to obtain their permit ASAP? “Number one would be file your permit application after the construction drawings are complete and coordinated,” Seiling suggests. “We receive incomplete applications eight times out of 10. When I speak to chief building officials of other municipalities, they’re having the same issue. So we’re taking the initiative to try to find out what’s causing this and see how we can fix it, because municipal building officials want to issue the permit ASAP.” 

And how could the provincial government assist? “It would be helpful if they would pause legislative changes,” Nheiley says. “This would help us catch up on our work to update our policy frameworks, particularly as lower-tier municipalities absorb the responsibilities of regional planning. They could also help to fund services so that these costs are not a barrier for development. In Burlington, we have over 40,000 new units in our development pipeline. These cannot be built without roads and pipes in the ground, increased potable water and wastewater treatment end-of-pipe capacity.

“We also have a new Official Plan in litigation,” Nheiley adds. “If approved, it would unlock a lot of development potential, allow the City to update its zoning bylaw, and eliminate a lot of unnecessary overprocessing of development applications.”

One concern is that many of the recently expedited building department services are partly due to a stagnant market, Charters offers. “Consumers that have taken their foot off the gas, but we’ve let millions of people in the country since the pandemic started, and we haven’t been building enough relative to the population.” 

“To be blunt, I think that the population growth in Ontario has exceeded the capacity for our industry to build enough,” Collins-Williams concedes. “This is why we need to streamline and find more efficiencies in processes and have a more permissive, flexible system. There aren’t enough warm bodies to move things through the system on both the private and public side.”

“You talk about the ‘silver tsunami,’ but I firmly believe we’re going to be facing a different type of tsunami with respect to applications and review timeframes as soon as interest rates are reduced a little and the spring market picks up,” says Charters. “We’re on a collision course, with two trains coming into the station on the same track.”