On top of Mark Stivers' desk in his office at the East Hempfield Township office can be found plenty of building plans, reports and other tools of the planning field.

"My office may be organized chaos, but I can usually find what I am looking for," Stivers said.

But one set of papers is instantly easy to spot — and it could be a sign of an economic turnaround for the suburban township and, possibly, a wider region.

For the just-completed calendar year of 2011, East Hempfield officials saw "a significant uptrend in total number of building permits," Stivers said.

"It's showing a positive trend, but whether it's a long-term trend or not, I don't know," he said. "But it is encouraging."

For 2011, the value of the commercial permits in East Hempfield more than doubled when compared to the year before.

The value of the 129 commercial permits issued in 2011 was $40.502 million, up from the $16.729 million of 2010.

And one month, July, saw $18.6 million worth of commercial permits issued, East Hempfield's largest month in terms of dollar value since the township started tracking this specific kind of data several years ago.

The value in 2011 of the residential permits, for new homes and additions such as decks and sheds, was $19.312 million.

That's up 48 percent from the $13.1 million of the year before, when 286 permits were issued, and up even more from the $12.1 million of 2009.

The suburban township in 2011 had the unusual experience of meeting its projected budget for building-permit income for the entire year by early last summer.

"It's great budgetwise," Stivers said, "but I'm a little hesitant to say that the economy has turned around, that the U.S. is safe, and 'Go spend-spend-spend!' We don't know that."

Stivers noted that "there are different indicators to look at to see where things are going" in terms of permits and how they reflect where the overall economy is going.

"If you look at the smaller mom-and-pop style commercial establishments, we see less of them closing right now and more of them coming in and opening up, which I think is a positive thing on the commercial side."

East Hempfield saw 41 new homes being built and more than 110 renovations to residences that required permits last year.

On the commercial side, though there were only nine new buildings constructed, there were 66 permits for alterations and five for additions.

Stivers said that one of the biggest "adaptive re-use projects" is the transformation taking place at the former Yellow Freight site on Manheim Pike.

That site, approved by East Hempfield in 2011, is being converted into a auto dealership for Mercedes-Benz and a specialty auto auction.

The three top projects receiving permits in 2011 were the new Landisville Intermediate School, the new Lancaster County morgue facility and the new Lancaster Toyota building.

Overall, people shouldn't read too much into a single month's figures, Stivers cautioned.

In some months, the figures may see a "bump" from one large project, but then not have any the next month, he pointed out.

Officials in East Hempfield could tell earlier in 2011 that the figures were encouraging. By July, the township had surpassed the commercial figure for both of the previous two years.

The permits are issued when a builder actually comes to the township and starts to build the first set of homes in a development, not when that builder gets the project approved by the township, Stivers said.

Building permits usually are issued a good year-and-a-half or two years behind the land-development approval, depending on the individual project.

Sometimes the smaller projects can add up to a lot when compared to one or two of the larger ones, Steve Brandvold, East Hempfield's building code official, said.

"It's not just the big multimillion-dollar projects, although those are great," he said. "And we are getting not just the new buildings, but also filling in unused buildings.

"So it's not just the great big commercial projects that you see. ... We're getting a bunch of these smaller strip-mall restaurants and stores as well."

Back in 2009, generally considered the height of the economic downturn, East Hempfield had issued 272 residential permits, with a dollar value of $12.1 million, while also issuing 90 commercial permits, worth $15.5 million.

East Hempfield actually collected $578,842 last year from the building-permit fees, part of an upward trend in recent years in that figure as well, Stivers said.

For the two previous years, those collection numbers had been far lower: $367,435 in 2010 and $231,080 in 2009.

doconnor@lnpnews.com