Yongin City Introduces Comprehensive Measures to Shorten Building Permit Processing Time

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Park No-hoon] Yongin City announced on the 2nd that it will implement "comprehensive improvement measures" starting in March to reduce inconveniences for citizens regarding building permit and approval procedures.

The measures aim to pre-emptively address factors that delay processing and enhance the professionalism of operations to handle complaints more swiftly.

To this end, the city will produce a building permit and approval work manual, post it on the Yongin City website, and distribute it to the local architectural society and relevant departments. A pre-check list will be separately provided to the local architectural society so that related documents do not go missing when requesting permits and approvals.

Additionally, the city will separately operate a "legal review advisory team" composed of civil servants in charge and architects recommended by the local architectural society to minimize errors in the interpretation of relevant laws and maintain consistency in work processing. When consultation with other departments is necessary, the team leaders of those departments will directly review the matter.

Document supplement requests will be limited to three times to enable reduction of civil complaint processing periods. Previously, without limits on the number of supplements, there were considerable cases where complaint processing was delayed.

In relation to this, the Suji District reduced processing times for building permit complaints significantly by limiting supplementation requests to a maximum of four times since June of last year.

The city will also require the building owner's contact information to be entered when applying for building permits and approvals, and will provide guidance on the complaint processing procedures through text messages. This is in response to cases where architects' numbers rather than building owners' were registered, resulting in building owners being unaware of the processing stage.

Additionally, the city will recommend to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport the amendment of relevant laws to change the timing of submitting "underground safety impact assessment" results, a factor pointed out as a major cause of delays, from "before building approval" to "after building approval but before construction notification."

For buildings with excavation depths of 10 meters or more, underground safety impact assessments must be conducted and results submitted before building approval. However, the consultation period with the Seoul Regional Land Management Office in charge of this has taken 3 to 4 months, causing significant delays in complaint processing.

A city official stated, "We are implementing improvement measures to provide swift and convenient building administrative services," and added, "We will continuously seek supplementary measures for areas where citizens feel inconvenienced."