Salt Lake City: Planning division in state of chaos

Planning is Ralph Becker's forte and he has vowed to fix a city function that auditors have flayed for a decade of dysfunction.
    But four months into the urban planner's run as Salt Lake City mayor, critics say the planning division remains in chaos - and frustration across the capital's small-business community is reaching a crescendo.
    Merchants wrangle for months to secure critical permits. Others feel helpless or harangued by a staff suffering from low morale and caretaker management. In some cases, $1,000-a-day interest payments - prompted by delays - have bled the budgets of developers who once hoped to build green.
    Despite - or perhaps because of - new committees, bureaucratic paralysis plagues a division that rarely functions when politicized. And Becker, who a growing chorus whispers has ceded control of planning to community activists with curious backgrounds, is coming under fire.
    "He may be a good planner, but he's never managed anything or anyone," says Ellen Reddick, president of the Vest Pocket small-business alliance who worked on the mayor's transition team. "Why is there no concern for small business? Does Ralph come out and own his city yet? Where is he?"
    Becker and his team plead for patience, arguing that a "back-to-basics" direction and the addition of three new directors are imminent.
    But as business owners fight a flagging economy, they say they no longer can afford to fight City Hall, too.
   
    Bruce Tanner's family has been pressing shirts and paying taxes at a neighborhood dry cleaner since 1929. But when the third-generation owner of Classic Cleaners bought an old 7-Eleven on 700 East near 1800 South for a second location, he got nothing but grief about his obligatory drive-through.
    Tanner pocketed the business cards of six separate planners who gave him a green light. But when he tried to get a drive-through permit, he was told the process would take 22 steps.
    Turns out, the city had placed a moratorium on conditional uses - "my mouth just dropped," Tanner recalls. After being shuffled between departments for seven months, Tanner finally got his papers this week.
    "Nobody wants to encourage you to do a project," he laments over the city's planning operation. "They're just thrilled if they can throw an obstacle in your way."
    Reddick notes the new regime has ranted about popular eateries, such as Eggs in the City, being too successful. And she argues that a conditional-use ordinance adopted in January "handicaps a small business in a neighborhood."
    What's more, the city's economic-development director, Ed Butterfield, just bolted for a job with the Redevelopment Agency.
    Liberty Heights Fresh owner Steven Rosenberg suggests economic development, which he calls the lifeblood of a city, "is not in its proper priority." He sees a theater planned in Sandy, the Grizzlies hockey team playing in West Valley City, and outdoor-recreation companies proliferating in Ogden - and worries.
    "The lack of leadership in planning is certainly making itself well known," he says, noting resident activists, not professionals, seem to be taking senior positions in the troubled division.
    "There's a great deal of consternation about it, but we haven't had enough time to pass judgment. At the same time, I don't think Salt Lake can wait. We need to move."
   
    A recent audit scolded the city for a culture of dysfunction in planning that dates back 10 to 15 years.
    But Doug Dansie, a Salt Lake City planner for 24 years, lays the blame for "destroying the place" squarely on former Mayor Rocky Anderson.
    "[Former Mayor Deedee] Corradini treated us like professionals, Rocky treated us like prostitutes," Dansie says. "We were here for no other reason than to get his picture in the paper. Now everyone is paying the price for it."
    Anderson rejects the criticism and says both he and his recently fired directors - Louis Zunguze and George Shaw - have been "scapegoated" to cover for an inept staff.
    "The biggest problem we have in the planning division is the merit system that doesn't allow us to weed out people like Doug Dansie, who was a huge obstacle to moving major projects forward."
    Anderson says a sense of "anarchy" led planners to violate ordinances then "pass the buck" when his administration intervened. He says the city needs "absolute pros" in planning and by simply shuffling staff, the new administration is "metastasizing the cancer."
    Still, glaring problems date back to Anderson's era. That was when Bruce Holt lost his home after battling the city for nine months for a drive-through window. The owner of Jitterbug Coffee Hop - which still is allowed only a 5-foot sign - now lives in the basement of his barely surviving business.
   
    Becker says the planning chaos and constant complaints haunt him in meetings, on the street, even at home.
    "I appreciate the frustration that everyone feels," he says. "It continues to occupy more of my time than everything else combined."
    The mayor says personnel changes and a complete reorganization will trigger improvement, but "it isn't a snap-of-the-fingers fix."
    He notes a backlog of 50 problem cases greeted him when he took office. And despite getting City Council permission this month for three new planners, Becker still is searching for three department directors.
    "You'll be seeing, in very short order, some changes in leadership and policy," he says. "We're right on track and on target."
    Critics wonder why Becker's senior adviser, Esther Hunter, seems to hold so much planning sway. Besides her citizen activism, Hunter is a former life-skills coach whose business offered herbal-oil counseling and rapid-eye therapy to curb stress and depression.
    But Becker rejects the notion that planning has been co-opted by what some call "community council fanatics," as well as any managerial shortcomings. Instead, he points to an ongoing overhaul his people have engineered, which includes more than half the audit's recommended fixes.
    "As someone who is a professional planner, I can tell you we have some superb planners, but they've been so browbeaten," Becker says. "Part of what we're doing is to reinvest in them the authority to do their jobs."
    Dansie isn't so sure. He says veteran planners have been stripped of their specialties.
    ''Instead of being rewarded for weathering the [Anderson] storm. We're being 'protected,' which is just a euphemism for being erased.''
    djensen@sltrib.com