Already in the first part of the year, Cleveland launched a digital permitting system with Accela designed to fuel economic development in the city.
San Francisco, meanwhile, debuted the first phase of its own permitting portal after four months of development with OpenGov.
As such projects become more common, experiences from the portal in San Francisco, where housing and construction bring complications and expenses more burdensome than in other areas, offer lessons for other officials bent on pursuing similar work.
For starters, think big, even though initial work might seem relatively small and piecemeal.
In San Francisco, upgrading permitting means nothing less than changing the business processes around that vital task and getting rid of “crummy workflows,” according to Elizabeth Watty, director of current planning at San Francisco Planning and the director of PermitSF, the portal.
Such goals had been around “for years and years” before the February launch of new digital permitting services, she told Government Technology.
Legacy systems, color-coded paper and manual processes won’t disappear overnight, though some strategic thinking around permitting could help prove the technology to reluctant residents, developers and officials.
“We tried to find high impact permit types” to revise early on, Watty said.
That doesn’t mean skyscrapers or other projects that require multiple permits and agency approvals, but those permits that have “pretty simple workflows” and which address the needs of common residents — for instance, people who want to replace windows in their homes, or small business owners seeking to improve operations.
Payments, too, represent an important if relatively mundane part of permitting, and the system can’t offer more friction when it comes to paying for services.
A system that actually works as intended isn’t quite enough to guarantee success, though. The law of inertia applies to the permitting process, and people used to doing permitting in a particular way — habits formed over years — are probably going to be naturally shy about trying something new.
That’s where public relations can play a role.
This doesn’t mean merely issuing a press release and hoping for the best. It means staff having conversations with permit-seekers in person as they wait in lines or navigate city offices, or even showing them how to use new kiosks and terminals to gain approvals. Think of the Apple Store retail experience.
Some regular permit seekers — the “frequent fliers” — may also be anxious about losing the relationships built over time with specific city employees, Watty said. Such education and even customer forums can help ease those worries. And the feedback from such people can go a long way to helping figure out what’s working and how to make the overall project better.
In fact, feedback is a vital part of bringing permitting into the 21st century via digital channels. The new system can more quickly and efficiently sniff out “pinch points” that staff can fix — data such as where applications are typically left incomplete can be translated into better wording on that paperwork or a different application altogether, for example. Watty said that data can offer deeper insights into the permitting process than in-person conversations.
As well, such data helps the city better “hold staff accountable” and see if permit seekers are being “dishonest” when they complain about problems. “You can gain more trust in government from that.”
The new system handles five types of permits now but future work calls for, among other tasks, making it easier for developers whose complicated projects require multiagency approvals to gain that through the portal. That would reduce delays and risk, which in turn could bring down development costs — a significant goal anywhere but especially in a city with an infamously high cost of housing.
“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” is how Watty describes the traditional, manual, pre-portal permitting process, a situation still faced by many permit seekers as this type of technology gains more traction.
