For years, the city of Albuquerque’s Planning Department has been through many growing pains.
On Aug. 28, Mayor Tim Keller and Alan Varela, director of planning, spoke to the GACC Board of Directors about the city’s work to improve operational efficiency and business processes within the city’s Planning Department.
Keller said during his time as mayor, he’s often heard from the community about the number of roadblocks when it comes to the Planning Department.
The Chamber has been a leading voice across multiple mayoral administrations, advocating for department reforms that would make permitting and approval processes more business-friendly and efficient to support economic growth.
Responding to these concerns, Keller told the board, “We’ve worked to streamline it all so that there’s not a big bottleneck for any economic development project. We have lots of challenges, and it’s getting better.”
The mayor asked Alan Varela to review the changes. Varela said streamlining processes such as business licenses has changed drastically.
Varela said implementing ABQ-PLAN has created more clarity for the customer and made it easier to customize the needs to each license.
Since the implementation, the trouble calls per day has gone from 50 to three. Meanwhile, the time to process a business license has decreased from 15 days to two.
Varela said inspection time has drastically decreased as well.
He said the average permit time has also decreased, with fiscal 2025 averaging 37 business days for a commercial permit and 15 business days for a residential permit. This is down from a high of 121 business days for commercial permits and 112 business days for a residential permit in fiscal 2023.
“The restructuring has made it more efficient for the entire department,” Varela said. “With these procedures, it helps the economic development process move along with not too many roadblocks.”