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Planning Department unveils permit-tracking portal and asks commission to approve budget additions for project review staffing
Summary
Staff previewed a new joint Planning/DBI project-permit tracking system (Accela citizen portal, sofpermit.org) to make case records and workflow visible; the department also presented a two-year budget that funds additional positions to reduce review backlogs and adds monitoring/reporting capacity.
Planning Department staff on Thursday showed commissioners an in-progress project-permit tracking system intended to merge multiple Planning and DBI databases, provide a public portal (sofpermit.org) and enable select online filings and scheduling.
Senior planner Kelly Amder said the system, built on Accela automation with a public "citizen access" page, will provide a single searchable project database, export GIS layers, attach formal correspondence and notices to records, and allow phased expansion of online filing and meeting scheduling. "This system is meant to track projects and provide much more detail to the public about where an application is in the review workflow," Amder said.
Staff emphasized transparency gains: the system will show discrete workflow steps, the planner assigned to a case, and attachments such as PPAs and environmental documents. The department also said it plans public training and stakeholder outreach; a summer launch is expected after additional staff training and significant data conversion work.
Separately, Planning—s finance manager presented a two-year operating budget that proposes roughly 11.28 new full-time equivalents in FY2014–15 (annualizing to 15 FTEs in FY2015–16) to implement departmental initiatives. The budget would convert a half-time monitoring and reporting position to full time and add staff for the historic preservation work program; staff said revenues from permit activity make the hires feasible and that the department will report on grant activity and monitoring work to the commission.
Commissioners praised the tracker as a major transparency improvement and asked staff to return with specifics on subscription and notice features, data fields that will be exposed to Open Data, and multilingual access. Staff said subscription features and broader automated notices are planned in later phases and that most project documents will be available online once converted.
