Port Orchard’s director of community development told the City Council on July 22 that a three‑day lean process review found the city spends far more staff time than necessary moving single‑family building permit data between systems and handling payments and inspections.

The review, sponsored by Director Nick Bond and facilitated by the Washington State Auditor’s Office, mapped seven permit phases and identified delays in transferring applications from Camino to the city’s SmartGov system, duplicate data entry, payment reconciliation and inspection scheduling as primary sources of “waste.” Bond said, “So the total time from submission to permit issuance is about 52 days while the ball is in the city's court.”

The nut graf: City staff proposed near‑term, low‑cost fixes, and longer‑term software and staffing investments meant to speed permit issuance, reduce rework and bring the city in line with statutory permit‑timing reporting.

Bond told the council that Camino has improved the quality of submittals but that staff must manually pull data into SmartGov. He said the process usually takes one day of actual work but, at current staffing levels, typically stretches to about seven days when multiple permits arrive at once. Plan review for custom homes averages three two‑week review cycles (about six weeks) while basic plan sets can issue in about two weeks. Bond also said the department averages 13 building inspections per single‑family home, including about four re‑inspections.

Staff recommendations in the presentation included (1) enabling SmartGov to accept payments end‑to‑end and reconciling with finance, (2) requiring frequent builders to use the online inspection portal, (3) training and software refreshes (including SmartGov and Bluebeam training), (4) exploring an API or IT solution to move Camino data into SmartGov, and (5) hiring or reallocating staff – for example a combination commercial/residential inspector and a dedicated permit system administrator.

Councilors asked about policy tools to discourage speculative inspection scheduling and whether penalties should be administrative or fee‑based. Bond said the city could administratively refuse to reschedule inspections for builders who repeatedly request inspections before the work is ready and said he would coordinate a policy that could exempt small “mom and pop” users. "We think that we need to require that our builders use the portal," Bond said when describing the proposed policy change.

Council members and staff flagged training and user‑experience as immediate priorities. Bond told the council the city had not had a facilitated SmartGov training since adopting the system in 2015 and recommended budgeting recurring vendor training. He also said Laserfiche will be used by year‑end to automate some utility work order steps.

Ending: Council members expressed support for pursuing a combination of policy updates, vendor training and an IT integration study; several suggested pursuing an API to reduce two full‑time equivalent (FTE) data‑entry workloads while the council considers larger software or consultant investments.