last week

When survivors from January’s wildfires in Los Angeles County apply to rebuild their homes, their first interaction might be with a robot.

Artificial intelligence will aid city and county building officials in reviewing permit requests, an effort to speed up a process already being criticized as too slow.

“The current pace of issuing permits locally is not meeting the magnitude of the challenge we face,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said when announcing the AI deal in late April.

Some 13,000 homes were lost or severely damaged in the Eaton and Palisades fires, and many families are eager to return as fast as they can. Just eight days after the fire began and while it was still burning, the city received its first home rebuilding application in Pacific Palisades.

Wildfire recovery foundations purchased the AI permitting software, developed by Australian tech firm Archistar, and donated it to the city and county. When property owners submit applications, the software first will examine them for basic compliance with zoning and building codes, suggest corrections and provide a standardized report on the submission for human plan checkers to review.

L.A. County officials hope the software — believed to be the first large-scale use of such permitting technology nationwide after a natural disaster — will slice the time its employees now spend performing menial tasks, such as measuring building heights, counting parking spaces and calculating setbacks, said Mitch Glaser, an assistant deputy director in the county’s planning department.

“We see our planners doing things that are more impactful for our fire survivors,” Glaser said.

Disaster relief and government technology experts said they’re encouraged by the initiative. Municipal permitting is the type of highly technical, repetitive and time-consuming process that AI software could make more efficient, they said, especially as residents are expected to flood local building departments with applications to rebuild.

Still, they warned that for the AI software to be effective, the city and county would have to integrate the technology into its existing systems and quickly correct any errors in implementation. If not, the software could add more bureaucratic hurdles or narrow property owners’ options through overly rigid or incorrect code interpretations.

“This could be fabulously successful and I hope it is,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute, where he studies disaster response. “But experimenting with technology in the context of people who’ve lost a lot is risky.”

Immediately after the fires, leaders at all levels of government pledged to waive and streamline rules for property owners to rebuild, promising that regulatory processes wouldn’t hold up residents’ return. Noting the pace of ongoing debris removal, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has called the region’s recovery “on track to be the fastest in modern California history.” A mayoral spokesperson said that the building department is completing initial permitting reviews twice as fast as before the fire.

More than 200 Pacific Palisades property owners have submitted applications to rebuild or repair their homes, according to a Times analysis of city permitting data, with 11% approved. Last week, 24 property owners submitted applications, the highest amount since the disaster, the analysis shows.

L.A. County, which is responsible for permitting in Altadena and other unincorporated areas, has a separate system for tracking permits which the Times has not been able to independently verify. On Monday, the county listed 476 applications for zoning reviews on its data dashboard, with eight building permits approved. By Tuesday, the number of zoning reviews listed had increased to 486 while the number of building permit approvals dropped to seven.

Besides Newsom, architects, builders and homeowners have grumbled about the permitting process, expressing frustrations at what they say are confusing and inconsistent interpretations of regulations. Last week, actress Mandy Moore, whose family had multiple homes damaged or destroyed in the Eaton fire, blasted the county for “nonsensical red tape” that is making it difficult for her to rebuild.

The wildfire recovery nonprofit Steadfast LA, started by developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, took the lead on securing the Archistar software and is covering much of the up to $2-million tab for its implementation. LA Rises, the foundation started by Newsom after the fires, will pay Archistar’s $200 fee per application.

Caruso, who declined an interview request from The Times, has said that turning to AI was a no-brainer.

“Bringing AI into permitting will allow us to rebuild faster and safer, reducing costs and turning a process that can take weeks and months into one that can happen in hours or days,” Caruso said in the news release announcing the deal.

Archistar’s AI permitting software has been in development since 2018. The company has contracts with municipalities in Australia and Canada and is expanding to the United States. In the fall, after a successful pilot program in Austin, Texas, Archistar signed an agreement with the city to perform initial assessments of building projects, similar to its intended use in Los Angeles. Austin has not implemented the software yet, but city officials said they believe it could cut preliminary reviews there to one business day from 15.

Once Archistar’s program is online in L.A. County, Glaser said, officials hope it will reduce the first analysis for rebuilding projects to two or three business days from five.

It could save additional time for projects by minimizing revisions and corrections, said Zach Seidl, a Bass spokesperson.

“The biggest potential for reducing permitting time comes from improving the quality of initial plans that homeowners submit to the city,” Seidl said.

Land use consultants and architects in Los Angeles said they were happy with any technology that could hasten approvals of their projects. But they said that AI wouldn’t ease the hardest parts of the permitting process.

Architect Ken Ungar, who is working with roughly two dozen Palisades property owners who are rebuilding, said his biggest headaches come from needing multiple city departments, such as those that oversee fire safety and utilities, to sign off on a project. Applications can get stuck, he said, and even worse sometimes one department requires changes that conflict with another’s rules.

Artificial intelligence, Ungar said, “sounds great. But unless the city of L.A. changes its whole M.O. on how you get building permits, it’s not super helpful.”

The state’s Archistar deal allows the city of Malibu, where the Palisades fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes, to receive the donated software as well. Malibu officials say they’re still deciding on it, noting that the community has specialized building codes addressing development on coastal, hillside and other environmentally sensitive habitats.

Governments are right to look to technology for help in speeding up disaster permitting, Rumbach said, but they also should ensure that human plan checkers provide oversight to account for nuances in zoning and building codes.

“I hope there are people more seasoned in communicating with disaster survivors who are the face of this,” he said. “A lot of people could be frustrated because they don’t want to deal with AI. They want to deal with a person.”

Although L.A. city and county might be the first to use AI for permitting after a major disaster, experts expect the technology to become mainstream soon.

“I’m confident there is no way back,” said Sara Bertran de Lis, director of research and analytics at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence.

L.A. County expects to implement the Archistar software within six weeks after programming and testing, Glaser said. At a recent disaster recovery panel, Bass said the city will do so “in the next couple of months.”

In the Tokyo Dome in March, you could almost hear the zip of the ball.

101 mph.

The pop of the catcher’s mitt sounded like a gunshot.

100 mph.

Roki Sasaki would lift his left leg almost to his head, stretch far down the front side of the mound, and let out a grunt as a blur of white leather came screaming from his hand.

100 mph.

For a brief moment, at the very start of his Major League Baseball career, it seemed like the Japanese phenom pitching prospect had already achieved one of his most important rookie objectives.

100 mph.

During his MLB debut in Japan, Sasaki hit those 100-plus-mph velocities on each of his first four big-league pitches. In the first inning of that March 19 game against the Chicago Cubs, he eclipsed 99 mph eight times in a 1-2-3 frame.

For a developing young pitcher who came to the majors this offseason fixated on improving his fastball speeds, it was a promising early sign — an apparent indication that, after suffering a slight drop in fastball velo during his last season in Japan, the 6-foot-4 flamethrower still possessed triple-digit life.

“The velocity,” manager Dave Roberts said that day, “was good.”

Roki Sasaki’s first four pitches of his MLB debut against the Chicago Cubs at the Tokyo Dome in March were at least 100 mph. He has not reached that velocity since.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Almost two months later, however, in one of the more confounding developments of the Dodgers’ otherwise successful start to the season, Sasaki hasn’t come close to even flirting with 100 mph again.

Instead, over a choppy seven-game sample following the team’s return from Japan, Sasaki has struggled to consistently throw the ball hard, averaging just 96 mph with his four-seamer on the whole this season while sometimes dropping down to the 92-93 mph range.

“It’s not an ideal situation,” pitching coach Mark Prior said. “Clearly, the fastball is not gonna carry through the zone at 93 very effectively.”

For some pitchers, this wouldn’t be as pressing a problem. Even in an era of rising fastball velocities around the sport, sitting in the mid-90s is still safely above the major-league average.

Sasaki, however, needs premium velocity (plus consistent command) to make his heater competitive. Because, for all his other raw natural talent, there isn’t much natural deception to the pitch.

Unlike the best fastballs in the sport, Sasaki doesn’t throw his four-seamer with much spin or “vertical break” (pitch characteristics that can give fastballs a rising illusion as they barrel toward the plate). While others can miss bats at even below-average pitch speeds, Sasaki’s four-seamer has a flatter shape that’s easier to hit.

As a result, his fastball has always been predicated on eye-popping velocity — requiring elite radar-gun readings to blow opponents away.

“The velocity allows for that margin of error,” Prior said last week. “And clearly, that’s not there [right now].”

In evaluating Sasaki’s underwhelming start to the season — he has a 4.72 ERA and 1.485 WHIP in his first eight starts, logging just 34 ⅓ innings with only 24 strikeouts and a whopping 22 walks — the most glaring red flag has been the performance of his fastball.

So far, his trademark splitter has been an effective weapon, yielding just a .158 batting average to opponents while generating whiffs on 35% of swings. His lesser-used slider has been a fine secondary option, with opponents batting just three-for-12 against it while coming up empty on 33% of swings.

Sasaki’s fastball, on the other hand, has been susceptible to the improved level of hitting he has faced in the big leagues, resulting in a .253 opponent batting average, a .494 slugging percentage, almost as many home runs allowed (six, not even including two others that were robbed on leaping catches by Andy Pages) as strikeouts generated (eight), and a 10.1% whiff rate that ranks fifth-lowest for four-seamers among qualified MLB starters.

Granted, Sasaki’s lack of command has factored into such struggles, leaving him all too often in unfavorable hitter’s counts where opponents are better primed to square up mistakes.

“I think guys are on his fastball because it’s the one thing that’s probably in the zone more than anything,” Prior said. “This goes back to his ability to throw the other pitches for strikes, and be able to mix, probably balance with all three.”

Still, since that adrenaline-fueled debut in his home country, Sasaki hasn’t thrown even one fastball that has topped 99 mph. In that same span, he has chucked 27 that failed to eclipse 94 mph. Each week, his declining fastball velocity has become a bigger conversation point around his outings. But so far, few answers have materialized about how he can fix it.

“Just really still in this process of finding out what the root cause [is],” Sasaki said through interpreter Will Ireton this past weekend, after the Arizona Diamondbacks teed off on a heater that averaged 94.9 mph in a four-inning, five-run start that represented his worst outing of the year.

“[I’m] working with my coaches, talking to people about this,” Sasaki added. “I’m not quite exactly sure and can’t really state exactly the single reason.”

The Dodgers’ coaching staff has faced the same conundrum this year, struggling to identify exactly why an element so critical to Sasaki’s success — fastball velocity was such a point of emphasis during Sasaki’s free agency this winter, he gave interested clubs a “homework assignment” about how they planned to improve it — has been so far from advertised during the start of his rookie season.

Prior acknowledged that there are “clearly some delivery things” that Sasaki is “still trying to work through” right now. After struggling with wild command in his first few appearances, Sasaki and the team also discussed whether slightly dialing back on the intensity of his throws could help him more consistently locate pitches over the plate.

Mechanics alone, however, don’t explain why Sasaki’s fastball has dropped into the low 90s for some stretches of the year, Prior countered.

And though Sasaki’s command has somewhat improved while throwing with less velocity, both he and Prior insisted his velo hasn’t dropped this far on purpose.

“For us, it’s always been like, ‘If it’s 100 or if it’s 98, that’s fine, if it’s easier to control or something like that.’ We had that conversation,” Prior said. “But nothing to the degree of where it’s been.”

Given that Sasaki has shown no signs of any physical ailment, it’s possible he could be experiencing more of a pitch conviction issue in his new MLB surroundings, potentially lacking the internal confidence to let his fastball consistently rip at top speeds.

“We go back to the drawing board every week with him. We try to talk to him about some certain things, some ideas,” Prior said. “But ultimately, he’s working through his process, and we’re just trying to support him with everything we can.”

To this point, that process has not involved the addition of a different fastball variety more apt at generating soft contact, such as a two-seamer or cutter. Sasaki has said repeatedly that his primary goal is to first refine his primary fastball-splitter arsenal.

“There’s been a lot of conversations about a lot of different things,” Prior said. “Again, we go every week with him, and we’ve been trying to shed light on things where we think there’s gonna be some improvement. But ultimately, again, I think it’s just him trying to get his footing under him, and be comfortable in what he’s doing.”

Indeed, the Dodgers continue to argue that this is all part of Sasaki’s long-term development arc — inevitable growing pains for a superstar who, despite all the hoopla that surrounded his signing, arrived in the majors as an admitted work in progress.

“He’s certainly talented,” Roberts said. “But there’s finishing school. That’s something that we were prepared for. I know it’s harder for him to embrace not having complete success, but this is a tough league.”

When Sasaki’s fastball has ticked up, he’s gotten results, too. On heaters thrown at 97 mph or above, opponents are batting just .133 with a .333 slugging percentage, and swinging-and-missing almost twice as often.

“He will make adjustments given how the hitters respond,” Roberts said. “I think you learn that by doing that here.”

But until that happens, and Sasaki’s fastball starts returning to the upper 90s or 100-mph levels he flashed in Japan, more struggles could lie ahead. More growing pains might have to be endured.