The city has also been working for the last year and a half to make the site plan sign-off period easier to navigate for everyone involved, said Heather Stouder, administrative services manager for the Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development.
After the city formally approves a development project, the project advances to site plan sign-off, where city staff review detailed plans and make sure they meet all of the city’s conditions and ordinances. Large mixed-use developments and individual building additions all go through site plan sign-off, Stouder said, though how long it takes depends on the complexity of the project and the quality of the submittal.
City staff completed about 400 such reviews annually in 2023 and 2024, said Matt Tucker, director of Madison’s Building Inspection Division. Most reviews are completed the year they come in, but occasionally one will take several years, he said.
According to the development teams, Stouder said, “It's been increasingly time-consuming and difficult to kind of get all of those boxes checked and move forward, and time translates to expense.”
The city heard from applicants that the process was unpredictable and could be hard to understand, and it heard from both applicants and city staff that communication was inconsistent, Stouder said.
Last year, staff identified 15 initial measures to increase overall predictability, provide more clarity about projects’ status and streamline communication between staff and with applicants.
The city has made progress on many of the measures, which are primarily “budget-neutral” improvements like modifying internal procedures and refining criteria for applicants, and has completed a few of them, she said.
Now the city is preparing for software upgrades this winter or spring that will help with communications and make submittals’ next steps more apparent, she said. Some of the other measures staff identified will also be able to progress after the upgrade.
Staffing shifts allowed for another zoning hire, and the Engineering Division is recruiting a new staff member. The Finance Committee recently adopted an amendment to the mayor’s 2026 operating budget proposal that, if approved by the City Council later this month, would let the Engineering Division hire another person, easing a bottleneck Stouder said has resulted from a lack of staff resources.
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