Denver officials touted improvements in permitting at a meeting Thursday held to gather public feedback at the Glenarm Recreation Center.

The city pointed to a roughly 34% reduction in the permitting timeline for a single family home or duplex project and a 14% reduction in time for a commercial project at one of a series of meetings the city describes as community conversations about good governance.

One resident in attendance said he has seen improvements to the city’s permitting process in recent years.

“Four or five years ago, I would have come immediately to this meeting and would have been primed to complain,” he said. “But now I’m just impressed.”

City officials also noted a 29% decrease in the time required to add comments to projects, which allows designers or architects to make changes to projects and get them completed faster.

Residents also took the opportunity to offer feedback on other city services such as the 311 service and how the city communicates about tickets created with that system.

The 311 service is a municipal phone line residents can call for a variety of services like reporting right of way violations or overgrown vegetation, or pay fines, among other things.

But despite a 95% positive response rate, according to the city’s website, residents said they want to see the city improve how it tracks tickets and give some indication on whether or when a reported issue is fixed.

“If your report is not completed to their satisfaction it is immediately closed and if you provide enough information then they send it to another department,” Bradley Abeyta said. “Oftentimes, I go find those spots (I reported) and nothing changes. There is not feedback loop. So, that’s frustrating.”

He wants to see more responsiveness from agencies, especially for small projects like painting new street lines. He added that it would also be good to see more detailed and comprehensive budget documents for those projects.

For his part, Mayor Mike Johnston said the community meeting – one of many that he has been to as mayor – was “validating.”

“It reinforces a lot of the feedback we’ve heard before and a lot of the things we believe,” he said. “Permitting is not going fast enough. People want to feel like they’re getting great customer services when they come to us. They want to be able to have one person who can be point on a given project and carry that through.”

Before the end of the year, Johnston said, he wants to have created a proposal for a set of “transformational changes” to further improve Denver’s permitting process.

Despite the improvements seen, Johnston and many other city officials said Denver can do better. Seeing a 34% improvement on a timeline of three years still means a builder needs to plan – and pay for – two years of effort before shovels can go into the ground.

One change that caught Johnston’s ear was a resident who suggested the city expedite the process for projects that are, by and large, identical. If a project is going to be the same thing in the same place and the same spot, Johnston and the resident agree the permitting process should be much faster.

“We want to look at any common sense changes we can make to simplify (the process) for people,” Johnston said.