Elshad Hajiyev looked out the office window in downtown Portland to the sight of massive construction cranes last week and smiled.
"It makes us happy," Hajiyev, Portland's Bureau of Development Services finance manager said Friday. "Because there are so many of them right now."
In response, BDS wants to hire 33 people to serve as new building inspectors, land-use planners, site development staff and other jobs closely tied to the construction market.
"The need for those positions is right now," Hajiyev said.
BDS, the bureau that processes land-use applications, screens development projects and issues building permits, among other tasks, is the city agency most closely tied to economic peaks and valleys.
Those cranes and other signs of construction, evident from Northeast Broadway to Southeast Division to North Williams Avenue to the Burnside Bridgehead, are literally money in the bank for the bureau.
Hajiyev said after years of cutting staff after the recession in 2009 and slowly building back, the bureau is "very close" to hitting prerecession staffing levels.
Bureau resources are up to a projected $48.8 million in permit and fee revenues in the coming fiscal year, nearly double the lowest point in 2009. The extra 33 jobs would bring the bureau up to 330 positions, Hajiyev said, 27 short of the level prerecession.
Some of the positions are engineers needed for large projects in the next year valued at upward of $800 million, according to Hajiyev.
Planners expect big development in the Lloyd District and South Waterfront.
Bureau officials planned to request new jobs during the upcoming 2015-16 budget year that begins in July, but Hajiyev said they bumped the request up a couple months to the spring budget adjustment time frame (when city officials close the books on the current budget year).
Adding the jobs two months earlier would mean a world of difference, Hajiyev said, as the bureau tries to expand services in the busiest construction months.
According to the citizen-led budget advisory committee, despite staff gains in recent years, "significant gaps remain in service levels" that lengthen the development review cycle for developers.
-- Andrew Theen
atheen@oregonian.com
503-294-4026
@cityhallwatch