A certain number of planning rules are important to protect public safety and maintain the quality of development projects in Lawrence.

Unfortunately, it’s too easy to let regulations take on a life of their own, creating endless and sometimes senseless hoops for businesses to jump through. Even if businesses learn how to negotiate the system, the cost, both in terms of time and dollars, of fighting their way through that system can become a deterrent to projects that would benefit the community.

It’s good that city commissioners again are focused on a problem that is increasingly important in difficult economic times. For decades, the city has been gaining the reputation as a place in which it is difficult to get a project done. Commissioners would be doing Lawrence a great service if they could finally rein in a planning system that has grown out of control.

A Journal-World article earlier this week shared the story of someone who wanted to start a small business in downtown Lawrence. As part of the remodeling to prepare the new space, a bathroom needed to be added, but before city officials would issue a permit for the project, they told the owner he would be required to conduct a “downstream sewer analysis” to determine whether the single toilet he planned to install would overtax the city’s sewer capacity.

Such a requirement might make sense for a much larger project, but it made no sense at all for this project. How many other silly roadblocks are city ordinances/officials placing in front of people simply trying to get a business up and running in a retail space that might otherwise sit vacant?

According to a city commissioner who owns an engineering firm, the aforementioned sewer analysis would cost $1,000 to $2,500. The excessive requirement to file a new site plan for a building that’s simply being remodeled would cost at least $6,000 and take 90 days to complete, he said. The cost of the study, not to mention the delay, could be prohibitive to some would-be business owners.

City planning officials are looking at some process revisions, but it seems that they still don’t grasp the magnitude of this problem. The city-county planning director told commissioners, “I think we do a good job of taking the mystery away from the process.”

Why is the process a mystery in the first place? A more straightforward process would benefit not only business people but taxpayers, who must pay for all the people and paperwork involved in the current planning process. Going through a planning process shouldn’t involve unraveling a mystery. In too many cases, business people report getting conflicting answers to various planning questions or having requirements change in the middle of a project.

Planning regulations are important, but when they impede good people trying to do good projects, there is a problem. Other city commissions have criticized the complexity of Lawrence’s planning process for years. Perhaps this is the commission that will stick with this issue long enough to pursue meaningful changes in the development regulations and the attitude of the people who enforce them.