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New development in Collier and Lee counties has flattened out after a long decline, but officials remain hesitant to say the market for new construction is on the way up.

“That is absolutely impossible to predict,” said Joan LaGuardia, spokeswoman for the Lee County Community Development Department. “We hit our low point in December ... with 35 permits. We’ve sort of bounced around since then.”

Both Collier and Lee, like other coastal counties on Florida’s west coast, have reported a fair amount of “bouncing around” with new construction, making it anyone’s guess where the market will go from here.

Lee County government issued the same number of permits for single-family homes in April as it issued in March -- 47.

However, that is a dramatic drop from the 262 issued in April 2007. It’s a modest decline from the 63 permits issued in February 2008.

Lee officials in January trimmed the size of its building department staff to meet the scaled-back amount of development.

“We laid off 29 people and they were all 100 percent supported by permit fees or inspection fees,” LaGuardia said.

Collier County government has followed suit with two different rounds of layoffs in its building department, first in January with 16 and again in April with nine.

At the time, administrator Joe Schmitt of the Community Development and Environmental Services Division warned that the layoffs could negatively affect the level of service his department could offer permit applicants.

The eliminated positions in Collier included inspectors, plan reviewers and permitting technicians.

Collier County Communications Director John Torre said he couldn’t tell whether that grim forecast ever came to pass. Schmitt was out of town last week and couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

“What prompted the (staffing) reduction was simply a result of the slow-down,” Torre said.

Single-family home permits issued last month were at 56, more than half the levels seen in April 2007.

Commercial permits issued last month were actually higher -- 20 versus the 13 issued in April 2007. However, those 20 permits issued in April represented $34 million in development, compared with $116 million in new commercial development in April 2007.

“They were in a position where the revenue (from permits) just wasn’t there,” Torre said of the staffing reduction.

In Lee County, the slump may be having a positive effect on service levels.

“What we’ve done is we just reduced staff to meet the current demand,” LaGuardia said. “It’s being met as it always was, possibly a little quicker.”

In neighboring Hendry County, even a steady influx of new building permits wasn’t enough to stave off staffing cuts to the Planning and Development Department.

Hendry Planning and Development Director Vince Cautero said numbers actually have gone up in the first six months of the fiscal year compared to the same time last year, partly because of renovations and remodeling.

“Our situation is a little different because we don’t have a lot of land that’s designated for commercial,” Cautero said. “It’s industrial here, so we haven’t had to face that glut, if you will, of over-designated land.”

The city of Naples has been insulated from the drop in new development, but for different reasons, Naples building official Paul Bollenback said.

“We’ve been surprisingly strong, but Naples is very affluent,” Bollenback said. “They build even when there’s a downturn.”

New home permits issued in Naples during April 2007 and April 2008 were the same, at five.

However, the first four months of this year have seen 18 single-family home permits issued, versus the 34 pulled in January through April 2007.

In the first four months of this year, Bollenback said, the city has issued 1,482 permits of various types, versus the 1,603 issued in the same period of 2007. That’s a reduction of about 8 percent, a far cry from the dramatic numbers witnessed in other nearby cities and counties.

Further up the coast, counties are having the same experiences as Lee and Collier.

In Charlotte County, single-family home permits went from 96 in April 2007 to nearly a quarter of that, 23, in April 2008.

Manatee County building official C.J. Dupre said following the start of the fiscal year when he had 86 employees, he is now down to 49 after several personnel shifts and 12 layoffs.

“That has created some delay in getting our inspections done,” Dupre said.

In both Sarasota and Manatee counties, permitting fees have been raised to counter the reduced number of permit requests.

“Normally we had been around $450,000 a month in previous years,” Sarasota County building official Paul Radauskas said of the fees. “In 2007, we went down to $300,000 or less on average. Current numbers now go back to 2005 levels.”

Radauskas stopped short of saying Sarasota County is pulling out of the slump.

“It was just a good month — a lucky month,” he said of April.

With a forecast for continuing troubled times in the construction and business industries, Southwest Florida community development departments are likely to keep their collective fingers crossed that such luck — where they can find it — doesn’t run out.