How do you divide up your administrative cases?

[bureaucrat#3]

Trying to figure out a better way to divide non-meeting cases (ie administrative site plans, minor subdivisions, sign permits). How do you do it?

 

[Lowland]

Two-person shop, myself as the Planner and my supervisor as Planning Manager. I handle cell tower colocations and smaller site reviews, my supervisor takes larger admin cases that require review closer to PC site plan review. I manage the ZBA and Historic District, so I get all of those cases for the most part, and since PC-required cases are sporadic and not high numbers compared to newer or booming communities, it makes sense he would handle the larger administrative review site plans as well. But we do not have a formal policy for this, it's just how it shook out once I came on board. My predecessor and supervisor may have had a different delineation of duties worked out between them.

 

[Faust_Motel]

I dole them out at our weekly meeting- if there's trouble with one we reconvene to work it out/decide what we need to ask for from the applicant.

 

[dw914er]

The easiest cases go to our permit technician, and the most complex get assigned to me as the department head, and the two planners pick the rest based on their interest, workload, or past communications with the applicant. I will usually offer supporting roles to my planners for my individual projects so that they can also grow (and to help manage my time balance of adminstrative duties and being a working director).

 

[SteveHarveyOswald]

Planning department of one, currently, so I do it all. Occasionally, I'll send a sign permit or two over to our GIS technician as she wants to get more involved in planning...although reviewing sign permits may be the easiest way to dissuade someone from going into city planning.

At a previous job, the assistant department head would randomly assign cases to the 3/4 staff planners via an excel spreadsheet, updated weekly; the more complex cases would go to the more senior staff.

 

[bureaucrat#3]

Bumping this thread. We get roughly 30-40 administrative items (sign, house setbacks, business license approvals, minor subdivisions) that come in every week. The task should range between a 15 minute review to an hour or two max. These are divided primarily between two employees and I'll jump in when something comes up or we get behind.

The easiest cases go to our permit technician, and the most complex get assigned to me as the department head, and the two planners pick the rest based on their interest, workload, or past communications with the applicant. I will usually offer supporting roles to my planners for my individual projects so that they can also grow (and to help manage my time balance of adminstrative duties and being a working director).

This is generally how we have been working, but I don't know why we can't keep up with them or why the employees look to me to assign them basic tasks. It seems like they should be able to simply either do it or let the other person know I'll take these if you take these. It feels like we either make this too hard or things don't get done.

 

[DVD]

We have a work queue. Every day one of the planners is assigned to work on the queue. This works for larger departments, I don't know about smaller ones. We also have enough people to share the load, but we don't ever catch up on the reviews either. I think we are 4 days behind right now. That's pretty consistent for us.

 

[CountyPlannerisHuman]

We have a rotating schedule of daily primary and backup planners who handle non-project related questions (email, phone, and counter) as well as basic building permit review (thing reviewing building permits that don’t require separate land use approval). We don’t formally assign tasks, but in my experience the primary and backup planners will discuss how they want to operate. So the primary will handle most of the questions and counter work, and the backup will do the permit review tasks. Typically, my planners will prefer one or the other, so when I schedule them I try my best to take this into consideration, but it doesn’t always work. Also, sometimes it can get tough just because of the randomness of it all. Typically there are a lot of random questions to answer, but each one takes considerably less time to answer, while building permit reviews can take quite a bit longer, but there are typically quite a few less, but sometimes our lovely building staff puts twenty permits in line for review in a day, or somebody is calling in because he wants to rebuild his damaged home located in floodway in the middle of a swamp and that question can take five days to get everyone in a room to answer it, and repeated return calls to get clarification.

In terms of actual land use permits, by policy they are expected to be rotated among staff qualified to review them. So think Planner Is generally review basic sign permits, home occupation permits, and basic BLAs, Planner IIs review BLAs, site plan review permits not requiring notice or a public hearing, and some basic conditional use permits requiring public notice, but no hearing, and can also review lower level permits typically reviewed by Planner Is based on workload and need, etc. I will admit, I try to rotate them equally, but there are definitely cases I assign to specific planners because of an interest in that case, or because of their expertise in that case type.