All right.

Mayor commissioners, as you know from previous conversations, we've been working on permitting for you know a number of years, but with some real great intensity and creativity these last two to three years.

It has been a you know permitting, um, plans review, plans examiners has been a national challenge.

The state of Ohio, we've even talked with them about what they're doing with regards to filling plans examination positions.

And so it um these last couple of years have been a little uncomfortable for our team because they've had my size nine and a half on their necks trying to figure out how we solve this, how we provide better service, because this is so important to the work we do in attracting invest uh uh investment into the city, right?

Um, our permitting um process is um real uh real time and and time delays costs a lot of money to our businesses.

So we know how important this is, and I uh first of all commend Emily and the team because you know they have been uh very um deliberate and intentional and and really looked at our processes and how we are accomplishing our processes.

We've talked and held focus groups with our um frequent customers at the uh one stop shop and who submit plans to get their feedback and um talk about what uh could be helpful for our process.

So we have done this with our customers, and uh I am really pleased.

We have made some major advances, and so I won't see any of the teams thunder, and I'll just turn it over to uh Emily to lead us in the presentation.

Mayor Manager.

Thank you for having us here this morning.

Um I have um Houston French here with us, our zoning administrator, Chris Nash, um, our chief plans examiner, and Scott Adams, our chief building official.

Um, this is the team that has been working diligently over the last year to work on our modernization of our party meeting processes.

So I'm actually really excited to share with you this morning the progress that we have made.

Um because of the importance of permitting.

It is kind of the gateway to development here in the city of Dayton, and it really impacts the speed and the pace of success for us across the city.

Um, it touches all parts of that built environment.

So from housing construction, small businesses opening, um, our neighborhood reinvestment efforts that have been quite in depth primary adaptive reuse of the buildings in our corridors and our neighborhoods and in our downtown, um, and then all of our new development efforts are all hooked in with the permitting process.

And in addition to the permitting, we are also responsible for the inspection.

So we go from the concept of what is going to be built, and we go through those inspections and then ultimately issue those certificates of occupancy so that those new businesses and homes can be safely.

So, as the city manager indicated, um, in with COVID and all of the other um changes, this is an industry where we've seen significant retirement in the professionals that do this work.

And as a region, we have about a generation of um you know, not heavy building and development project.

So we are kind of experiencing a surge in this area while at the same time we don't have the personnel in this region who are skilled in these things.

Um, and so it has been an internal strain.

Um, and the team that sits up here with me today um is you know, who has kind of pulled us through this time.

Um, we because of that staffing shortage, we have relied on outside consultants, and we continue to do so to essentially make the most of the capacity that we have.

We have tried to use another strategically to help us with inspections as well as significant projects in the plan examination process.

So some of the other things that have contributed to the comments that we get or the challenges we have faced in permitting have been that we are still on a paper-based process.

And so I'm going to share with you all a bit more about where we've been, where we've gone, and where we're headed in the next few months.

That is because not only do the folks from planning neighborhoods and development and building services have to touch the permitting process, but we also need to be coordinating with our other departments.

Water, civil engineering, and oftentimes fire are involved in the permitting process.

And so making sure those paper copies get distributed across we get reviewed.

We also were experiencing some permitting backlog in 2024.

And that was partially because of the paper process.

So permits would come in, then they would get distributed around.

And so there was often a lag because we were waiting on a copy of a plan to go somewhere.

And that also contributed to limited process visibility.

So people were having to call to find out where their permit was in that review process.

And it did cause delays in those permit issued because even when we were communicating and letting people know they had revisions to complete on their submissions, it was sometimes unclear to them and sometimes to us where we were in that process.

And so we did last year in early May, we met with our group of development partners and really wanted to listen to them so we could hear what their specific concerns were.

We kind of knew what was going on, but we really wanted to hear from them what was their customer experience like.

Again, that paper process, we were seeing things stalled.

So they would get comments back from one reviewer, but they wouldn't always get comments back from all of us at the same time where they were able to address them in an efficient way.

And those communication gaps that kind of merged in that process.

And so what we really identified through that endeavor was that we had a need for predictability, transparency, and how we coordinated that process and were communicating back out to the customers.

So one of the first things we did is we took a look at how we were processing the permits as they came in.

And one of the things we were noticing is we would accept a permit, and then it would sometimes sit at the counter for a few days before it would actually get entered into the system, making it even more difficult for us to track it.

So one of the first changes we made was those plans did not sit on a counter for longer than one business day.

So if they came in, we needed a clear counter by the next afternoon.

We also started doing a sense of centralized tracking.

We started using our Silla product at a higher level.

We started putting the comments from the different reviewers into the system the way it was supposed to be used.

That meant that any of us could pull it up and we could see what was happening.

That increased the process transparency dramatically because now increasing the process transparency was really essential, and that was something that we were able to do without really any staffing changes.

It was just using our tools better.

That also led to improving that review visibility.

So those comments were going back and forth between the reviewers and the applicants much quicker, and we were able to coordinate between our partner departments as well.

In the early part of the summer, so June, July, um, we really focused on cleaning up our backlog.

And what I mean by that was we had some larger projects and some smaller projects that had been submitted quite some time ago.