Gorge Commission previews new online permitting portal and planner hub, details digitization and rollout plans

At its April meeting the Columbia River Gorge Commission previewed a new public-facing permitting portal called Civic Access and the commission’s back-end eP&L (enterprise permitting and licensing) planner hub, demonstrating how residents will submit development-review applications and how planners will process them.

The demonstration showed a user creating a secure account, selecting a parcel by address or tax lot, uploading a site plan, and submitting a development-review application. "This is where residents would come to, begin an application for, development on their property," said Mike Crank, a commission GIS and systems specialist, as he walked commissioners through the public screens and the planner-facing hub.

Why it matters: the system centralizes permitting records, links application data to the commission’s GIS layers, and adds search and reporting tools staff said will make retrieval and historic queries far faster than the old Access database. Staff also said the rollout includes digitization of roughly 35 years of paper records and a new document-management system and agency website as part of the same IT project.

What staff demonstrated

Crank demonstrated the applicant experience (account creation, parcel lookup by tax lot or address, project description fields, attachments and a digital signature) and then switched to the eP&L hub that…