Technology, one hopes, is now coming to the rescue of the city Department of Planning and Permitting, but it cannot succeed without the human component — one that’s trained up to the task.
The department is famously backlogged with building-permit applications, causing long and costly delays for businesses and residents. Back in the run-up to the last mayoral election, this problem was decried by then-candidate Rick Blangiardi, himself a businessman who vowed it would be his priority at Honolulu Hale to fix it.
So the mayor has a lot riding on moving the needle on what has been a source of frustration in the city for decades — although significant improvements are not expected to materialize quickly. DPP is in its early rollout phase for a three-part initiative aimed at streamlining its permit process and making it more transparent, so that applicants would know where they stand in the line for approval.
Completion is projected to take 18 months, well into any second term Blangiardi hopes to win. Some public access to the system is expected midway through the process.
However, even before that point, the voting public should expect the administration to report back frequently, every month or so, on how well the implementation is going.
Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, DPP director, began her outline of the changes at a March 27 news conference by pointing out that as of 2021, at the start of the mayor’s term, the agency used pneumatic tubes to convey print application forms around the building. To call it last-century technology is no exaggeration: That kind of resistance to change was at the core of the department’s dysfunction.
Now there’s real hope for improvement, and the city’s client base of applicants are expressing some cautious optimism. There will be three new elements of the permitting system:
>> The $5.6 million Clariti, a Speridian Technologies permitting management platform, has been in what the director described as a “discovery phase” for more than six weeks, adding that the department is about to begin its full development.
>> DPP had moved away from paper documents in July with ProjectDox and its ePlans system from Avolve Software. But now there’s a federally funded $206,000 upgrade that will allow applicants to add team members, such as contractors and landowners, to view permit status. In a bureaucracy long seen as impenetrable, adding this functionality will be welcome.
>> CivCheck is a recently added partner with DPP. It is an artificial-intelligence-based software company that has a platform using AI to simplify code compliance and plan reviews by allowing applicants to evaluate their plans in advance to verify its compliance with regulations. It’s now in a four-month pilot project with DPP, at no cost to the city, something that’s also welcome.
If all of this sounds complex and a substantial departure from business as usual at DPP, it surely is. That is why the city must ensure that there is robust staff training and cross-training, to have sufficient personnel backup for dealing with the inevitable hiccups in the system.
Much of these improvements were financed through the pandemic-era federal Fiscal Recovery Fund. And making a core business function of the city operate competently is an appropriate use of those resources.
What the public must hope is that DPP manages such a game-changing overhaul skillfully, with the backing of vendor tech support firmly in hand. The City Council must provide oversight to this end.
It is encouraging to see forward movement in this long-awaited upgrade to city systems, but even the best tech requires steady human hands at the helm.
