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County hears OpenCounter/Accela pitch to streamline permitting; staff to return with cost details
Summary
Vendors from OpenCounter/Accela presented a pre-application permitting platform to Klamath County, said procurement is available through NASPO/Carahsoft to avoid an RFP, and offered an 80/20 implementation payment split; staff will supply cost-per-application modeling to inform a final decision.
Representatives from OpenCounter/Accela and Exela presented a proposal on May 20 for a pre-application, user-facing permitting platform to reduce front-counter workload and speed permitting. Justin Duszalski identified himself as an account executive for the vendor and described technical features: zoning lookup, fee calculations, GIS integration and back-office tools.
Presenters said the county could procure the product off the NASPO/Carahsoft contract without issuing an RFP and described a five-year subscription model plus a one-time implementation fee. They said one procurement path would allow the county to adopt an instance under the state contract or, later, convert to a standalone instance.
Vendors said implementation can be split (they discussed an 80% up-front and 20% on-completion split) and highlighted that the implementation team comes from local government backgrounds to reduce staff burden during configuration. County staff and commissioners asked about costs and fee impacts; vendors said year-one costs include software plus implementation but projected a per-application incremental cost of roughly $50 when amortized over 1,000 applications in later years.
Commissioners said they wanted time to consider a local vendor option that also presented earlier in the meeting. County staff said they would return within a week with detailed cost and cost-per-application numbers to help inform the procurement decision; no authorization was given at the session.
