City of St. Maries building permits

Tips & gotchas

• St. Maries is an incorporated city that self-administers its own Building Department (602 College Avenue, City Hall; Building Official Jacob Parsons; Permit Coordinator Kasie Wise) -- it is NOT routed through Benewah County. Third-party permit-aggregator sites (e.g., allpermit.net, countyoffice.org) list a 'Benewah Building Department' at 701 College Avenue, Ste 3 in St. Maries, which appears to be a county-facing listing distinct from the City's own Building Department at 602 College Avenue. This entry covers the City's own department and code (Title 9), per cityofstmaries.org and the official St. Maries City Code.
• The City's Fee Schedule is a single omnibus document (Resolution No. 2026-362, updated 06.22.2026) covering all city fees — Building Permit Fees are Table 3/3-A specifically, distinct from Table 2 (Planning and Zoning/Land Use fees) and Table 4 (Utility Application and Connection Fees, including a Sewer Permit and Inspection Fee of $25 residential / $100 industrial under City Code 8-1-6(C), which is a Public Works rather than Building Department permit and is not included as a permitType in this record).
• No jurisdiction-published plan-review or permit-issuance turnaround time (in business or calendar days) was found for ANY St. Maries Building Department permit type as of 2026-07-19 — St. Maries City Code 9-2-5 (Issuance) sets no day count, unlike, for example, the City of Lewiston's published Permit Review Schedule with explicit maximum-day figures by category. Idaho Code section 39-4117's 10-business-day (residential) / 20-business-day (commercial) statutory backstop applies only to whether an application is deemed COMPLETE, not to full plan review or issuance, and was not populated as a reviewTimelineDays value in any permitType to avoid overstating what it guarantees or compositing residential/commercial figures into a single misleading range.
• St. Maries City Code 9-2-1 creates THREE distinct permit pathways under Title 9: (1) a general Building Permit issued by the Building Inspector, requiring a licensed-surveyor field survey with limited exceptions; (2) a Boundary Structure Permit for fences/retaining walls within 10 feet of a city street or alley, issued by the City Clerk under a separate survey-exception/right-of-way process; and (3) demolition, which is exempt from the field-survey requirement and uses its own dedicated Demolition Permit Application. A fourth pathway — the Agricultural Building Site Permit under 9-1-2 — exempts qualifying farm structures from the building code entirely while still requiring City Building Department sign-off on siting.
• Building valuation for the general Building Permit is set two ways depending on scope: new builds use 'the most recent ICC Building Valuation Data' (Table 3), while all other work uses 'the contractor's total estimate (labor, materials, overhead, and all other associated costs),' with IBC 109.3 cited for the rule that an underestimated valuation may result in permit denial unless the applicant can substantiate detailed cost estimates.
• The 2018-edition model codes (IBC/IEBC/IRC/IECC/IMC/IFC) plus 2017 NEC and 2017 Idaho State Plumbing Code are adopted by direct reference to the Idaho Building Code Board's own editions (St. Maries City Code 9-1-1), and are automatically superseded by successive state-adopted editions each January 1 — meaning the city's in-force code edition can shift without a new local ordinance, unlike jurisdictions that re-adopt codes by their own resolution on their own schedule.
• St. Maries has no standalone commercial building permit and no tenant-improvement/TI permit product — not on the Building Department page, the Forms page, the Fee Schedule PDF, the Building Permit Application PDF, or in Title 9 Chapters 1-2 of the City Code. Both new commercial construction and TI/remodel of existing commercial space use the same Building Permit Application ('Commercial' Building Type checkbox; 'Remodel'/'Change of Use' Scope of Work checkboxes) and the same valuation-based Table 3-A fee schedule as residential work. The only commercial-specific fee difference is a higher Table 2 Planner review fee ($100 commercial/industrial/non-residential vs. $60 residential). The one genuine code-level distinction for TI/remodel work is that alterations to EXISTING buildings are governed by the locally adopted 2018 International Existing Building Code (9-1-1(A)(2)) rather than solely the 2018 IBC that governs new construction. Nothing in those sources indicates St. Maries routes commercial plan review to Benewah County, the Idaho Division of Building Safety, or a third-party firm — see the commercial-building-permit and commercial-tenant-improvement-permit entries.