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When the city of Portland’s Bureau of Development Services received approval – and funding – in March to hire 18 new employees, Land Use Division Manager Rebecca Esau knew it would not come in time to stave off the department’s summer rush.

Eleven of the approved positions are at various stages of the hiring process. The remaining seven have been filled, but Esau estimates training those new employees will take between six months and one year.

Meanwhile, Portland has experienced a boom of development and construction projects, the result of a recovering economy. The number of customers the bureau deals with, for example, has increased by 9 percent during the first six months of each of the past two years.

“We are overwhelmed,” Esau said. “Things have bounced back and bounced back quickly. We are hiring people and trying to get them up to speed.”

The bureau has been using aggressive training for the newly hired employees, moving them quickly into job shadowing and mentoring programs. They also are working directly with the public in the department’s plan center. But even for new hires with experience in planning and permitting, the learning curve can be steep.

Gina Tynan, who was the department’s first hire in April, is a 17-year planning veteran who left a senior position in Memphis, Tennessee to join the BDS staff.

The biggest challenge for Tynan has been getting to know the city’s zoning code, which weighs 13 pounds and is approximately 1,000 pages thick, or about three times the size of codes in communities where she’s worked in previous jobs.

“Luckily, if you don’t know something, you can look it up,” Tynan said about Portland’s zoning code. “It’s pretty large.”

At BDS, she’s training almost daily on TRACS, which is the city’s permitting database. She’s been learning GIS mapping software, how to use Portland Maps and how to process planning applications. She’s also benefited from having two assigned mentors, experienced BDS staffers she’s been able to turn to on a daily basis.

Complicated codes

ÌýThe length of time it takes to get new employees up to speed at BDS depends on their levels of experience and their familiarity with Oregon’s land use laws and Portland’s municipal codes, Esau said.

“It’s a very complicated code we’re dealing with,” she said. “There are base zones, overlay zones and plan districts which have specific regulations to those parts of town. You have to figure out how those interrelate to each other and how to measure different things, like a house shown on a building plan.”

The new hires at BDS bring a range of experience, from entry level to senior planners. Tynan, for example, is a level 2, mid-level planner and can handle a range of more complex planning documents.

“She’s a gem,” Esau said. “Because she’s so sharp and knows how to read plans for the most part, she’s a star. She’s ahead of the curve.”

Learning to wait

ÌýUntil its new employees are all on board and trained, the department is trying to ease its backlog by paying experienced staffers overtime for longer days and weekends, Esau said. Many senior planners, meanwhile, also are being tasked with the implementation of the city’s new ITAP system, which will create a more integrated planning and permitting system by 2015. Once that system arrives and new employees are up to speed, the system should be faster and more efficient, Esau said.

Developers and builders who have projects moving through the development process, meanwhile, say they’re learning to expect a wait.

Noel Johnson, a developer with Vancouver, Wash.-based Killian Pacific, said the city planner on Killian’s Goat Blocks project worked three weekends in a row, “writing staff reports and making things happen.”

“I can’t blame him,” Johnson said. “It’s taken us forever to get through the process, but I have a ton of sympathy. It’s been very, very difficult.”

Johnson generally gives city staff credit for putting in the extra hours. But he thinks more front-end investment should have been made last year to hire additional staff as the economy improved.

“The city is fortunate to have people psyched to want to work here,” Johnson said. “The city has the best built environment in the country. It just takes time to do it.”