Local construction regulatory process innovation: A comparative analysis of Florida building inspection departments

This research focuses upon the organizational behavior of city and county building inspection departments, local government regulatory agencies which implement community development plans and policies. The personnel who staff these departments are street-level bureaucrats much like police, welfare workers, and teachers. However, unlike the latter groups, neither building inspectors nor their organizations have been studied in great detail. The intent of the study is to document some of the factors associated with the decision of Florida building inspection departments to implement innovative administrative, personnel, informational, and management features which assist citizen assess to and through local permitting and inspectional processes. Based upon field research conducted in Tampa, Florida and investigations of eight other jurisdictions across the nation, the researcher hypothesizes that the decision to adopt specific innovations stems from three independent variable sets--political, community (socio-economic), and organizational. To quantify and test the hypotheses, indicators are operationalized by a questionnaire distributed to 218 building inspection departments around the State of Florida. The results of the survey, a stratified, random sample, which netted 136 responses (29 percent of the State's building inspection agencies), suggest that local departments do differ in their decisions to adopt different types of innovative administrative, personnel, informational, and management features. The most powerful predictors of these decisions tend to be the type of local government structure in the community (for cities only) and the extent that agency permitting revenues cover department operating expenses. These variables were predicated, respectively as a measure of the centralization of power in the community (a political set variable) and as an indicator of organizational slack (an organizational set variable). Together they accounted for more than 37 percent of all the statistically significant associations uncovered. Other findings suggest that: (1) Although local government structural types may be important in explaining the decision to innovate, other political set variables tend to score relatively low; (2) The use of computers in recording and aggregating permit data at the local level is not nearly as widespread as expected; and (3) Agency staff tend to prefer informal plan and development review sessions to highly structured and visible formal meetings that some communities have instituted. This paper concludes with a call for additional research into local development regulatory activities and functions. Such studies should capture the concerns of the targets of regulatory decision making--citizen users and clients--as well as the input of agency line and staff employees.