I disagree with nothing kleinbl00 said but here is my take on it here in Portland.

The city laid off a ton of the permit office people during the downturn and than when things got good again construction took off. Many of the people they laid off didn't return and so they hired a bunch of people who didn't have much time to sit around and get mentored and educated on every nook and cranny of the building codes. They aren't good all that good at their job yet.

All these employees have a slightly different understanding of the codes. The codes have undergone significant changes in the last few years as well, some people know the old codes, some know the new codes better.

This causes a giant clusterfuck.

Every time you go through an approval and get rejected a new person takes a look at your plans and sees some new thing. You end up goign through another two week turnaround. You hope your architect has time to revise the plans and that the contractors you are working with have an open scheduled as you push them back another two weeks.

You want to file an appeal? Fork over $500 bucks to file and they will get to your appeal in two weeks. Hope the appeal doesn't piss someone off because if they want to find another thing wrong with your plans they can. Maybe you need a seismic review?

Want to sue them? That costs a shit ton of time and money, it couldn't be worth winning.

Here's another nice one. My plumber was doing another build out for a tap room a block away from my shop around the same time I was doing my build out. I had one kind of drain for my three part sink and a different type for my espresso machine in what I had believed was the code. Planning told me that it was all wrong, the drain on the espresso machine needed to be the type I had for the three part and the drain for the three part needed to be the type I had for the espresso machine. The plumbers were astonished. They had just installed the exact drain in my plans on a three part that month in the tap room. They went back and looked at the code and sure enough code had changed in the last year and requirements had been reversed but the planning people didn't notice for the tap room.

Health came in, looked at my drains and said that they were wrong and I was going to have to fix them. I got my plumber to send the new code over and my health inspector said "well I be darned..." No one could tell me why and there is probably only a few people in the world that could tell you why.