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O�SELLr^ C ti V 3 Planning and (ommuniity Development Department City of Rcllingharm March 26,2024 Honorable Pat McCarthy Washington State Auditor's Office Insurance Building,P.O.Box 40021 Olympia,WA 98504-0021 Dear Auditor McCarthy- On behalf of the city of Bellingham,thank you for the opportunity to review and respond to the State Auditor's Office Performance Audit on the"Growth Management Act.County and city compliance with the state's 120-day permitting requirement"(Report).We appreciated being involved in the audit and look forward to implementing many of the recommendations outlined in the report,some we've already done and/or begun.Additionally,we appreciated working with the audit team as they were helpful and professional throughout the audit. As noted in the Report,the audit period(2019-2022)covered an extremely rare time for our city,nation and world as the COVID,19 pandemic significantly impacted our daily lives,including the permitting realm. Locally,we were forced to shift some of our permitting staff to other pandemic-related work.Retirements and staff vacancies also significantly impacted?review timeframes.For example,during the audit period, of the 18 dedicated permitting services staff,9 of those positions were at one-point vacant. The report also acknowledges the complexity of land use permitting with evolving regulations such as critical areas and stormwater,many of which the State mandates.Bellingham is boarded by Bellingham Bay to the west, the Chuckanut mountains to the south, Lake Whatcom Reservoir to the east and substantial wetlands and streams to the north and throughout the city. These factors complicate permitting reviews and require additional reports and time for review;we commonly note that all the easy land has been developed. The city of Bellingham believes in continued process improvements in permitting performance and began utilizing LEAN methods to help reduce redundancy and "waste" throughout the land use permitting review process beginning in 2015.Those initial changes helped refine our reviews and resulted in reducing the number of required meetings,speeding up completeness review and shaving valuable time from the overall permitting process.Though time saving strategies were gained in that initial LEAN review, it is acknowledged we need to continuously improve our processes(Report Recommendation). We would like to note that during the time period between 2015 and today,the City has made smaller improvements such as using templates for minor critical area permits and internal checklists for building Planning communky Development awlldlnj Enu Do"lopmftj tilrvipe 220 LoWe Street 210 Lottle street 21D t6ttw sli@rL Bellingham,WA 98225 Bellingham,WA 98225 Qviintilinm.WA!)ht#5 Phone:(360)778MOO Phone:(360)778-8500 Mono,�16%778 113Q0 Fax:(360)778-8302 Fax:(360)778-8302 F"otni fM 83r}1 77Y:(360)779-8382 TLY;(360)778-8382 rrV-9,1017 24 Al 57 Email:planning@cob.org Email:cd@cob.org fowl peffl+inckmbai1 www.cob.org/planning www.mb.org/ptanning wa w Wlb.q�foenrnli i ~growth Management AcI - A9vncy 8esponse 39