City rolls out Permit Midland portal; officials say permitting and inspection times are improving
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Summary
The City of Midland launched Permit Midland, an online permitting and inspection portal, and staff reported faster review and issue times for building permits as the portal and related process changes take effect.
Midland Development Services has launched Permit Midland, a customer-facing online portal for building and trade permit submissions, payments and inspection scheduling, and city staff presented performance metrics showing faster review and issue times.
Elizabeth Triggs, planning and development officer, and James Rawls, the city’s process improvement manager, described the portal and recent improvements in permitting and inspections. Triggs said the new portal complements other process changes and dashboards and that the portal ‘‘allows for the scheduling of inspections online’’ and gives residents and builders visibility into permit status. James Rawls said the portal had a long development effort and emphasized user education: "This is a project that we have been working on since September. There have been a couple attempts to bring this live previously that failed. The key reasons they failed was we did not focus on making sure that the public was educated and trained on how to use it."
Staff reported measurable performance gains since they implemented process changes. For new single-family residential permits, average review time dropped from 7.2 business days in FY24 to 1.6 business days in FY25; average issue time fell from 11.9 to 7.3 business days. For commercial permitting, review times dropped from 16.1 to 3.5 business days and average issue time fell from 53 to 29 business days in the cited period. On inspections, staff said on-time completion has improved to roughly 96% of inspections completed within one business day of the request.
Staff said Permit Midland currently handles building and trade permits, inspection requests and public permit searches; it will expand to additional permit types, planning applications and a field inspections app so contractors can schedule from phones. City staff stressed the portal is optional while the city educates homeowners and smaller contractors, but they encouraged volume builders to adopt it.
Council members praised the improvements and asked staff to continue monitoring performance metrics and take further feedback from contractors and builders. The portal is live and accessible to the public, staff said.