Opening a Brick & Mortar Business in Sacramento? Think Twice.

Renee Joneck
Jul 28
11 min read

Starting your own brick & mortar business is a huge feat in itself. It takes courage, attention to detail, strong sense of curiosity, comfort standing up for yourself, critical thinking, fearlessness, quick access to a therapist, comfort with questioning authority, ability to sniff BS when you see/hear it, a wealth of patience, strong will, and a shit-ton of money.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, if you're trying to start a physical business in Sacramento under the umbrella of a bar or restaurant, you'll need all of the above and more.

There's a significant volume of business owners living in fear to speak up about the challenges they've faced, because they're afraid of retribution from rogue city officials, and it's beyond disturbing. That fear is real, the stories you hear are real. And sadly, because it's real, it will continue because there aren't enough people willing to step forward to ensure accountability and make it stop. I hope my voice starts to open that pathway for others to come forward, so others aren't tortured....and Sacramento can flourish with small businesses.

Sacramento officials have a narrative that they care about small business, but it does not. It can't or it would show in their practices. What I've seen, experienced and observed is that Sacramento sees small business as a burden and something to avoid supporting. Did you know their definition of 'small business' in their 'Streamline Sacramento' initiative is a business/project valued at $1 million dollars or more? That group is allotted a special Development Project Manager to help them through the process. I'm sorry, but if my business value is $1 million, I can afford my own consultant to help me through the city process. It's the businesses under $1 million that needs a presence in Sacramento.

This article was inspired from Jake Abbott's coverage in the Sacramento Business Journal's article entitled, Obstacle to Progress, Business Owners say Sacramento's building permit process is stalling projects. It was great visibility to what's going on, but now we need the context and accountability. Why didn't more businesses raise their hand to go on record and share their stories & how many were interviewed? How are the Midtown Associations and Sac Metro Chamber being empowered to support businesses?

We need accountability around why the Building Department Process is unnecessarily difficult. There needs to be transparency around the real challenges. In my second go-around in opening a business in Sacramento, the difficulty seems to be by design to prevent, true, small businesses from opening (ie. valued under $1M in project value). The question really is, why? Is it a lobbyist ploy to deter small business and bring in higher tax-value businesses? We're not sure, but we all deserve answers from these Public-Serving Officials.

I'll touch on a glaring issue in the building department and will have more blogs addressing additional elements that don't fit here.

Building Department Timeline

The official timeline for the building department process is approximately 4-6 weeks depending up on the scope of the project. That process has four seemingly easy steps:

Application Submission with completed architectural drawings.
Plan Review: 14 business days.
1. Plans are distributed to Reviewers across multiple disciplines that include, but not limited to, Plumbing, Structural, Electrical, Life Safey (ADA), Fire, Air Quality).
Corrections Review: 7 business days.
1. Plan Reviewer sends feedback to make updates, changes to existing plans. When Business resubmits corrections, Plan review has 7 business days to come back with additional corrections or approve the permit.
2. City allows three rounds of corrections, and after that, the business must pay an hourly rate to the City for any additional reviews.
Approval/Permit Released: 5 days

Once the permit is released, the business can begin construction on their space. If you have any questions about the permit process, you're given a link to This Document or you can visit their Counter Service Team during the week. Otherwise, there's a portal of documents Here.

CHALLENGES

The Application

Whether you email or go into the office, they give you several urls to figure out the process. There's the Main Plan Check Page, a Workflow Sheet, a Checklist to ensure you have everything, and then a Site that hosts all the forms to complete.

The challenge is there is not one person who makes themselves available to guide you in determining which forms to fill out, how to fill them out, who to talk to if you have questions. I've been told, literally, that "we're not consultants. if you need help you should hire someone to help you". I then asked, "does the city offer any list of city-approved resources we can use?", the answer was "we don't make recommendations".

That's odd considering Sacramento has an entire website and page helping built to help you find an asbestos Consultant. Yes, an asbestos survey/certification is required, as part of the Bldg Dept process. You have to pay for the survey (est. $750 minimum, increase is based on your project size) and your permit won't be released without it. No one tells you this, you just suddenly get a notification email after you've submitted your application.

I'm creating a separate blog about the hidden fees the city requires. Stay tuned, I'll link here once it's live.

What they won't tell you

They won't tell you the price of your permit because, "it depends". Yet, no one can clearly articulate what the dependencies are, and cost ranges, so you can update your budget.

They won't tell you that only the 'Building Owner' or the General Contractor can receive the permit. The Business Owner has no authority unless you put your name as the "Project Contact". If you don't, you won't receive notifications about corrections, you won't have access to the portal to view records.

They won't tell you that even if you go into their onsite service desk, whatever that representative told you, doesn't count. We have our plans accepted during preliminary plan review at the service desk, told everything looked good and we just needed to upload the docs into the portal. 10 days later, we have a ton of corrections across four departments. Basic corrections, things that the service desk should have caught/told us about. When I brought that up, the Plan Check contact tells me, "service desk isn't responsible for telling you what to correct on your plans". Then what is their role, why are they there?!

They won't tell you your architectural drawings don't belong to you in the eyes of the Bldg Dept. You can pay for the plans (and we know they're not cheap), you could have in your vendor contract that the plans belong to you. However, if during the permit review process the Architect goes MIA, the city considers the plans Intellectual Property of the Architect. Therefore you must start over with another Architect who has to redo the plans or you have to get the original Architect to sign a release giving you permission to change/edit the plans. The Bldg Dept. will not acknowledge your contracted agreement. We had this happen to us, it delayed our process by four months and we had to hire an attorney to get the criminal architect to release the plans over to us.

To make it worse, the original plans were created by me in an excel format and was involved in the final design, the architect's role was to take that information and align it with Bldg Dept. Compliance rules. When I contested this with the Bldg Dept, I had a nice representative tell me this has happened before and toto send my original drawing and they would consider it. Two days later I received an email from another Bldg Dept. telling me they'd already told me they wouldn't accept me as the owner of the plans and to "not contact the original rep again".

My Original Drawing:

Compliant Drawings

Now, don't let your General Contractor go MIA on you. You're hosed.

They won't tell you that if your General Contractor disappears, you literally have to start over. They will not release the Permit or Permit communications to you. They will only release information to the GC or the Bldg Owner and if you get the Bldg Owner involved, they must sign several documents stating they are accepting liability if something goes wrong. Well, we know they're not doing that - and as a tenant, you have a Lease Agreement that states you are taking/accepting liability for the space and construction. It's insane, but we saw the fallout first-hand. It is common to have GCs disappear in the middle of a project and when it happened to us, we went to the Bldg Dept. counter to ask for help. It was like we were at the DMV on the last day of the month. It was chaotic, the lines were insane and there were only 2 people behind the counter to help, while there were at least 20 employees standing around talking to each other watching the chaos. No one can help, no one accepts authority to help and if you do find someone, they'll give you information and as soon as you get home, suddenly they're silent and a new person tells you something completely different. If you reference the Counter Service direction, you're told they're not qualified to give that information. You may as well have stayed home.

They won't tell you which departments will review your plans, nor will you receive contact information about those Plan Reviewers in advance. Even if you have a question, you're told "they'll contact you once they're done with the review process". You now have to sit and wait 14 days before you hear from anyone, only then will you receive an email from each, individual Reviewer with your Corrections or approval. They will tell you it's 'up to' 14 days, however - you won't hear from anyone until the afternoon of the 14th day.

They won't tell you there's the ability to expedite the Permit Plan Review process so you're not waiting 14 and 7 days each round. They won't offer it up and it's the very last form on their website. But don't get excited people. The expedited process goes from 14 business days in the first review, down to 10. Any additional reviews drop from 7 business days to 5.

Hidden Fees

And the Fee? The Fee is 50% of your permit fee. A fee they won't tell you about until after you've submitted the application because, again, "it depends". This is significant because your Permit Fees are based on the 'valuation' of your project costs (construction, equipment, furnishings, supplies, etc.). It won't matter what you list as your project valuation on your application, even if it's accepted and approved during the Preliminary Review process. If there's another person in the department who just decides your valuation is too low, they'll change it. That change means your permit and expedited fees increase. Try and fight it? They'll tell you to get three bids on your project, they'll review the bids and determine if they'll accept that amount. That becomes more time and money exerted on your end that delays your project. They don't care.

Now let's counter the expedited fee process with the Health Department, under the same City, to open your bar/restaurant, you are required to have approval from both departments. However, the Health Dept. has a flat expedited review fee of $1,450 regardless of the project type. The review process is then shortened from 20 business days to 5.

Now, let's switch to the release of your permit. Once your permit is approved, you receive an email stating your permit is on hold until you pay a Sewer Impact Fee. Not once during this process did anyone speak of a Sewer Impact Fee and the only explanation of what is is: it's so the city can assign someone to calculate the expected additional sewage coming from our space, based on size and capacity. The cost of assigning a City employee to calculate this number? $3,700 - and you must submit to the City proof of payment and a Letter of Release from the Sac County Regional Sanitation District. The turnaround time for this documentation? 3-4 business days. No one on that side answers their phone, it's email only and the turnaround time for email response is 1-2 days. AND the update on the Proof/Release requirements are listed as a Conditions footnote at the end of your permit release email.

How is the disparity so wide from departments that intersect so closely? Do these departments not speak, do they not align on process and best practices to ensure the public is served in the best, most efficient way possible? Doesn't seem like it.

The reputation of the Building Department in Sacramento is so bad, that an official at the ABC (Dept of Alcohol Beverage Control) strongly recommended that I open my business in Elk Grove or Roseville because Sacramento is so, "...difficult to work with".

What's sad is there are indeed some really great planners/inspectors. But they are few and far between. They're empathetic to the issues, understand and are apologetic, but they have no power to change it. They're just as defeated.

The statement from the City is this is a 'small group' of disgruntled Businesses. Which means the article from Jake Abbott will be brushed under the rug and more real small businesses will not open. My questions are:

How many businesses were interviewed but wouldn't go on the record out of fear?
Why is it that of the three businesses who went on the record, we're the only ones still in business?
Can the Sac Metro and Midtown Association go on the record and document the number of businesses who are dealing with these, and many more, challenges with the City and Bldg. Dept.

The statement from the City in the article is they have an 98%~ on-time success rate is not real. I want to know:

What permit types are they referencing?
What percentage of permits are from true Small Businesses (under $1Million in value)?
What percentage of Small Business applications make it to the finish line (and how are you tracking the reasons why)?
How are you evaluating your processes and employees (I've never seen a satisfaction survey referenced in the article, nor have many of my business owner colleagues)?
What does the Bldg Dept consider on-time?
How are you tracking efficiencies of your Plan Reviewers (response rate, # of corrections per cycle, etc.). ex: how clear are Planners in their Corrections/Comments notes. If the business is coming back with errors, that's on the Plan Reviewer if it goes to 2-3 rounds. If they're taking the full 6 weeks, and having 2-3 correction cycles, that isn't a win. It means there was a disconnect in how the planner communicated their needs, and that needs to be addressed. The goal is getting businesses open and contributing to the economy, safely and successfully.

My goal is to help other true, small businesses start-up and thrive. My hope is the City of Sacramento takes these issues seriously. Businesses aren't not opening in Downtown, Midtown Sacramento because of the unhoused issues, it's because of the hidden, unnecessary and subjective costs and obstacles thrown at them, without recourse.

There's this initiative called Streamline Sacramento that started last Fall 2024. Their purpose is to remove these roadblocks for small business in Sacramento. However, (a) they're only focusing on small businesses valued at $1M - very telling and (b) I read their meeting notes from their March 2025 quorum and I'm sorry to say, I was really surprised (and not in a good way).

Take a look for yourself at the "Potential" Actions Summary notes doc from the meeting. My immediate thoughts:

What exactly does 'Potential Actions' mean? these are 'maybes'?
Where are the next steps, with dates to follow up?
Where's the Owner for each item, called out specifically so we know who is taking ownership, accountability, authority, and responsibility for each point?
Why are most potential action summaries starting with, Consider, Identify, Explore, Revisit, Request? I must say, most of these topics are ones that should have been flushed out a long time ago. It's concerning there's still confusion or need to 'discover more' around basic process within the department.
Why is it almost August and we've heard and seen zero updates on this Streamline program, nor updates from the March meeting?

Comments