There are lots of ways to describe Baltimore’s permitting system. Byzantine. Kafkaesque. Nightmarish. Headache-inducing.

Pick one. Pick them all. It all boils down to a universal truth: Any government system where the consumer has to rely on a bearded, short-short-wearing guru whose name is a play on an Italian cheese brand in order to navigate it efficiently is not ideal.

Well, Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration and City Council are ready to do something about it. On Tuesday Scott’s office published a new permit plan called Bmore FAST, which stands for “Facilitating Approvals and Streamlining Timelines.”

The plan, a 40-page set of guidelines for remaking how developers, business owners and residents interact with city agencies that tell them what they can and cannot do, does not yet have a price tag. Its release, during a City Council hearing on Baltimore’s myriad permitting problems, comes on the heels of last week’s news that Scott’s administration would be hiring a “permit czar” to oversee all these proposed reforms and take several disparate parts of government and make them not.

Few in city government have wanted comprehensive changes to the permit process more than Councilwoman Odette Ramos. A housing obsessive, Ramos has asked for some sort of top-down review for years. She’s got questions and concerns about the efficacy of the plan, but she’s also glad the rest of City Hall is clued in.

“This is a good thing — we’ve just been asking for it for a really long time. This is not new,” she said.

The reform effort is coming at a crucial moment. Scott’s administration has a bold, $3 billion plan to tackle Baltimore’s vacant building crisis. For it to work, developers and prospective homeowners have to want to buy and rehabilitate buildings that are in dire straits. Charm City has enough problems to overcome, and self-inflicted ones like poor permitting only make it more difficult.

“We can’t control interest rates. We can’t control construction costs. We can’t control global supply chains or capital markets,” Justin Williams, deputy mayor for community and economic development — and possible permit czar — said. “But we can absolutely control how our own government operates.”

Right now the government is operating with a lot of bottlenecks and blind spots. The fire marshal’s office is understaffed — there are four employees who both review plans and do inspections. The Department of Public Works might not be talking to the Health Department or the Department of Housing and Community Development or vice versa. Plans don’t get reviewed in a timely manner. Inspections don’t happen. Put bluntly, it’s a train wreck.

Bmore FAST could change that. Everything would be housed under one roof. Some review processes and general home improvement plans, all which require individualized review, will be standardized. Others privatized or outsourced to a “third-party.”

For example, the Fire Department is looking at having third parties review plans for things like kitchen hood installations or sprinkler systems with fewer than 50 sprinkler heads.

If outsourced, that means an estimated 25% of all plans reviewed by the fire marshal would go somewhere else, officials said.

“I think that number is a little bit conservative,” Fire Chief James Wallace said.

The fire marshal’s office is a major pain point for people trying to find their way through the permit maze, said Lou Catelli, the aforementioned sherpa whose real name is William Bauer. And Catelli would know. He’s handled more than 600 permit applications since 2016.

But it’s not the fire marshal, or the lack of agency communication, or that if you want to get some in-person help with your permits you need to show up before 11 a.m. for optimal customer service, that has Catelli fired up these days. It’s the new software system the city rolled out last month as part of its foray into permit improvement.

“It’s been a debacle. It wasn’t well-baked, and it was released before it was ready,” Catelli said.

Customer service data from housing and community development back that sentiment up. The department received almost as many calls in February as it did in December and January combined. The average call was nearly twice as long as January’s, and the phones rung so often they were answered at a less-frequent clip than in recent months.

Given the less-than-great rollout of the permitting software, members of City Council’s Housing and Economic Development Committee seemed skeptical that all of the Scott administration’s plans for Bmore FAST could come together in a timely fashion. Agency heads were reluctant to give timelines on key components like third-party outsourcing or creating public-facing data dashboards, even when Committee Chair James Torrence, whose West Baltimore district figures to benefit greatly if the vacant housing plan works, requested them.

Council President Zeke Cohen suggested that the administration might be trying to “boil the ocean,” given the breadth of Bmore FAST.

“Pick two or three things,” Cohen said, later adding, “If we try to do everything, we’re not going to do anything.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this article.