City presents new permitting dashboard; permits issued on time but issuance delays persist due to applicant resubmissions

Matthew Greenberg, Deputy Development Services Director, gave a data-rich briefing on calendar year 2025 permitting performance and introduced a new Power BI permitting dashboard for operational management. Greenberg said the city received just over 31,000 new permit submissions in 2025 including 22,645 unique building permit applications and completed roughly 73,401 review cycles. "The average building permit application required about 3.24 reviews for approval prior to permit issuance," he said.

Greenberg explained statutory timelines under Florida law (e.g., 30 business days for small residential, 60 business days for larger projects, private-provider timelines) and said staff met statutory review timelines on 22,634 of 22,645 building permit submissions (about 99.99% compliance). He contrasted the short statutory review cycles (e.g., average building and flood review ~17 business days) with the longer submission‑to‑issuance metric (roughly 113 calendar days), which staff said is driven primarily by applicant resubmissions, allowed resubmission windows (up to 180 days before abandonment), unpaid fee balances and prerequisite permits (seawall, demolition) needed for issuance.

Staff showed new operational tools — nightly reports, a versioning column to flag repeated resubmissions, and a dashboard that allows managers to see forward workload and to reassign reviews to avoid bottlenecks. Greenberg said the city is updating checklists and digitizing common attachments to reduce incomplete submissions and expects incremental improvements after a software refresh and data cleanup in May. Council asked staff to publish updated checklists and to make property-owner notification of review status a priority.