Solar driving increase in Ramona building permits

By Karen Brainard

The number of building permits issued in the unincorporated county showed the highest gain this past year since 2008-09, and in Ramona solar energy projects are the driving factor.

Ramona Community Planning Group Chair Jim Piva sits on the county’s Land Development Performance Review Committee where he received a chart showing the number of building permits issued over a 10-year-period. In fiscal year 2002-03, the county issued 9,945 building permits in the unincorporated areas. That number gradually decreased and then significantly dropped in 2008-09 to 4,998. Since then building permits rose slowly, but more so from 2011-12 to 2012-13, when an 8 percent jump brought the number of permits to 7,887.

“You can see how bad it got. It’s getting better,” Piva pointed out at the planning group’s Oct. 3 meeting.

The permits fall under the categories of residential, mobile home/trailer, commercial, solar, online, and miscellaneous.

The county provided the

Sentinel

with statistics for Ramona’s 92065 zip code for the past two years. For 2011-12, the total number of building permits issued was 496. That increased to 753 in 2012-13, with solar accounting for more than half. There were 409 permits issued for residential and commercial solar, and solar water heaters.

San Diego County Planning and Development Services saw a countywide increase in residential solar permits with nearly 950 more issued in 2012-13 than the previous year.

For the Ramona area, permits for new primary residential structures stayed the same with 24 issued each of the past two years. The slight overall increase in residential permits, from 124 to 142, was mainly due to structural additions and alterations.

Commercial permits dropped from 45 in 2011-12 to 27 in 2012-13.