Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Group hopes to make Hailey business-friendly

Municipal daycare licensing dropped

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By TONY EVANS
Express Staff Writer

The Hailey City Council dropped a requirement Monday for municipal daycare business licenses, choosing instead to depend on required state licensing requirements.

The redundancy in licensing requirements was pointed out to city leaders by Sustain Blaine Executive Director Harry Griffith.

Griffith hopes to study more complicated land-use processes in the future, with the goal of making Hailey more business- and developer-friendly.

Griffith has been working on the Sustain Blaine "Blockers" program, a joint study of city permitting and licensing processes aimed at increasing city staff efficiency and establishing uniform municipal processes.

The goal of the Blockers program is to bring about a more accommodating environment for businesses in Hailey.

Griffith said in an interview that the city could continue to collect licensing fees, although redundancies such as daycare licensing are eliminated.

Griffith focused on commercial building permit processes and licensing procedures, creating 20 flow charts that map communications and administrative processes through various city departments, identifying redundancies and showing opportunities for more streamlined work flows.

The study was undertaken with paid and volunteer staff time by Sustain Blaine (Griffith is the organization's only paid employee) and paid staff time within Hailey city departments.

Griffith presented findings from the study to the Hailey City Council Dec. 5, identifying "significant" duplication between city and state licensing requirements. He said the city should consider using an electronic forms program and rely increasingly on professional staff, rather than bringing minor issues before the City Council.

"Why does the council approves taxi licenses, but not daycare companies? Ultimately, we would like to see the same licensing and permitting processes in Hailey as are in Ketchum and elsewhere," Griffith said.

Griffith said Hailey's building permit process could benefit from having a single facilitator overseeing each permit process. He said the current application procedure is overly complex, and lacks a tracking process.

He offered the city further help by studying the Planned Unit Development and zoning processes, which developers have complained are too complex.

"Developers get lost in the labyrinth," City Administrator Heather Dawson said to the council last week.

"We haven't saved the city money so far, but these ideas could save the city time and money in the future," Griffith said in an interview.

Tony Evans: tevans@mtexpress.com

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