After weeks of delays, city’s building permit pace picks up

Sept. 2, 2025

Construction has started inside Flyboy Donuts on East 10th  Street — and calling it not a moment too soon is an understatement.

Owner Ben Duenwald had anticipated starting a renovation of his kitchen space in July. It serves as a central production facility for Flyboy stores, and with new lines, “we need more space,” he said.

“In the meantime, our other locations can produce for the fact that 10th Street does not have a kitchen right now.”

But it wasn’t supposed to last for months.

“I thought it would be four weeks,” he said, basing it on past experience with city approvals.

Instead, “we were 27th in line,” when his building plan was submitted to the city of Sioux Falls, Duenwald said.

His staff members were forced to improvise for weeks, and he even lost employees because of it.

“We waited and waited, which delays every other thing,” he said. “We could not pour concrete until the last week of August. It’s bad in my opinion because I run a business and want to keep going and I get frustrated with inefficiency.”

His contractor for the renovation, Reynolds Construction Management, began noticing an overall slowdown in city permit approvals in early spring.

“And then by the time we got to kicking the summer off, it was definitely a lot slower,” owner Paul Reynolds said. “We didn’t notice it in the beginning, so we were giving our clients that normal timeline basis, but after we started noticing a lag, we just needed to be transparent and say the schedule is going to start when we get the permit, so bear with us because the permit can take eight to 10 weeks.”

The Flyboy Donuts project was caught up in the worst of the delays.

In early July, more than 80 building plans were in the queue waiting for review, said Jeff Eckhoff, the city’s director of planning and development services.

The outcry was heard, he added.

“We’re definitely aware of it and trying to work with people and get the message out about what’s going on,” he said.

The department was navigating multiple personnel-related challenges, he continued. Three people review commercial building plans full time, while a manager handles the administrative side and also takes calls and reviews plans as time allows. One of the full-time plan reviewers took another role in the city, “so we lost that person, and it took us awhile to fill it,” Eckhoff said.

“We also have another plans reviewer who just does residential, and that person was promoted up to commercial, but his position is still open, so he’s doing residential and commercial plus learning the commercial side. He’s doing a great job and catching on really fast.”

The residential job should be posted soon after being delayed for budget management, he said.

“On top of that, it’s summer, and people are taking vacation,” he said. “So if one person was out a week, that was killing us too.”

Other challenges include contractors who are newer to the community and not as familiar with its building codes, he said. That requires more time from staff to work through the process of permitting.

“We’ve seen residential builders doing the first commercial project really struggle not knowing the difference,” Eckhoff said. “Even with some of the savvy contractors, as they grow and people move on, they’re replacing new project superintendents, and sometimes the company isn’t new, but the staff is.”

It all prolongs the time it takes for a permit to be approved as city officials ask for more information from the contractors.

“We’re fully aware what this does for the building community,” Eckhoff said. “We understand time is money, and it was unfortunate this was the perfect storm of staff and a busy season as we’re also very likely approaching the second-largest building year we’ve ever had.”

The city now has shortened its queue to about 25 plans, which typically would take four weeks to review and approve from the time they’re submitted — on target with the historical average.

That varies depending on size and complexity of the project, Eckhoff added.

“It doesn’t usually take that long unless it’s a big project,” he said. “They usually can turn it out in a week or two depending on complexity and completeness.”

He encourages contractors to reach out to the city ahead of bringing in a plan to go through a checklist of what will be needed in plan review. With larger projects, the city schedules regular meetings “to check and make sure everything is going well,” Eckhoff said.

Reynolds said he has seen an improvement.

“We’re getting to review the plans faster. We’re getting our questions sheets back sooner,” he said. “We’re doing something on the east side — a renovation for Boys & Girls Club — and we only submitted 4.5 weeks ago, and when we asked last week, we were No. 7, so I feel good about that.”

Building permits drop in August, though year ‘is still looking great’

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