Building Permits in Bismarck Up - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

Miles from the heart of oil country construction is booming. 

During the past year the number of permits issued in the Bismarck area has risen by the thousands.

Reporter Sarah Gustin has the details on your growing city.

From businesses to homes--Bismarck is expanding it's borders.

Last we issued 500 and this year we jumped over to 808 single family residential permits. That's a huge increase. 

Ray Ziegler is the Building Official for the City of Bismarck.

Ziegler says last year his office issued about 7500 permits, compared to roughly 4500 in 2011.

It's definitely demand driven. Our service industry, some manufacturing, retail they are all growing tremendously. And of course that drives the need for employment and everything else.

He says from 2011 to 2012 single, family residential permits jumped from 500 to more than 800. 

(Ray Ziegler / Bismarck Building Official) "You can only build infrastructure so fast. The streets, sewers, utilities, things like that. I would say we are keeping up at a pretty good rate. We try to control issuing permits to a point. We have to work with the reality part of it and keep everything flowing, but it's a full time job trying to do that."

Ziegler says most of the growth is along the Highway 83 corridor, but he expects more industrial growth to push eastward.

And all those permits add up to a lot of cash, roughly 400 million dollars.

It's exciting but it's also worrisome. We start diverting our manpower to new construction. We are an enforcement agency and we still deal with zoning violations, flood plan violations. When we start putting 90% of our resources into handling that new growth, something has to be set aside and that worries me.  

Ziegler expects the growth to last for years to come. 

Ziegler says the Lincoln area has been growing very fast.

He expects the new school to create even more residential growth.