Aloha and good morning, everyone.

It's Thursday, September twenty-fifth, twenty twenty-five.

The time is eleven oh six AM.

I call the Committee on Government Efficiency and Community Services meeting to order.

I'd like to welcome committee members uh Vice Chair Wire as well as Council Member Nishimoto.

Uh, Councilmember Cordero is on her way and will be joining us shortly.

Pursuant to Hawaii revised statutes, Section 92 3.7, this meeting will be conducted as a remote meeting by interactive conference technology with the following procedures in effect for the meeting.

Members of the public will be allowed to provide oral testimony on all items in the agenda in two ways in person in the council chamber and remotely.

Remote and in-person oral testimony will be allowed when each agenda item is taken up and is limited to a one-minute presentation on each item.

As both English and Hawaiian are official languages of the state of Hawaii, pursuant to Article 15, Section 4 of the Hawaii State Constitution and Section 1 13 of the Hawaii revised statutes.

Members of the public may testify in either language.

For oral testimonies offered in Alila Hobai, additional time as may be necessary will be allowed for the testifier to provide an English translation of their testimony.

All persons who have registered to testify in person will be called upon first.

When your name is called, please come up to the testifier podium and state your name for the record.

Persons who have not registered will be given an opportunity to testify following the registered testifiers.

After the in-person testimony is concluded, I'll proceed to remote testimony via video conference or phone.

When I call your name or the last three digits of your phone number, please press star six when prompted.

Hawaii Rise Statute, Section 92 3.7 requires that all votes at a remote meeting be conducted by roll call unless unanimous.

Therefore, I'll first call for objections, and if there are any, I'll call for a roll call vote.

Written testimonies, including the testifier's address, email address, and phone number will be available to the public as described in the posted agenda.

As a courtesy, please turn off or silence all cell phones for the duration of this meeting.

And we'll begin with agenda item number one.

This is an informational briefing on the implementation of the HL build permitting platform.

Members of the Department of Planning and Permitting will be providing us with a brief presentation.

We've distributed a copy of the presentation in hard copy form, and it's also available online as Departmental Communications 740.

We have with us, we have with us the mayor, 15th mayor of the city and county of Honolulu, Rick Blangiardi.

We also have the managing director, deputy management director and chief of staff, and the director of the department of permitting and planning, as well as their deputy director.

Mayor, you want to start, committee chair Dosantis Tim.

Thank you, Council members.

Um I asked to go first this morning uh because I'm very passionate on this subject.

You know, from um day one in office, fixing DPP has been a top priority.

We've we're well known for saying we wanted to take on the wicked problems.

There was nothing probably facing the city or us as an administration and team as far as a challenge in DPP.

In fact, the prior mayor told Managing Director Formville and I, you can't fix it.

You might as well just implode the whole thing.

It's impossible.

And even then in coming into office, we looked at an audit that the city had done the year before, which talked about for decades the lack of investment in people, technology, et cetera, et cetera.

This was a daunting task in and of itself.

And if we were to do nothing else than just try to take on DPP, much less all the other things that we faced, it would be an incredible challenge.

But nonetheless, we have.

And that's why I asked to speak before Don Takuchi Upunugets up here, director, um, because great respect for the effort.

So let me just give some context to this.

Um, first of all, I came out of a technology-driven business for 40 years.

Plus, I went through every iteration here in Hawaii and elsewhere from the time when satellite technology wasn't available to making that available to everything one could do in control rooms, et cetera.

And along the way, throughout the course of that time and the leadership roles I had, the installation of technology, okay, never easy.

Very difficult, in fact.

The transition is, you know, um, you just got to go through a whole lot.

Learning the equipment, the integration, getting people on board, et cetera.

And those were much smaller settings and far less complex candidly than anything the DPP represents.

We have been in full discovery on where we wanted to go and to replace a system like Posse that was done in 1998, okay, to today's software system and working with a company like Sporidian was a huge leap for us.

Took a lot of time to understand the problems we were facing, developed the right solution, and then determine who would be best.

And then on top of that, the daunting task of all of that data having to be integrated.

Um we wanted it to go off smoother than it has.

There's no question.

We expected that.

Um, and we've had some bumps.

That was not unexpected.

So recently, I've been on the phone with the CEO Ali Hasan from Spuridian, recognizing full well and admitting their contributions to the difficulties we face.

They have now been here with a team of people.

We're in a situation called hyper care.