Uh good afternoon.

I'm Kevin Wilk, mayor of the City of Walnut Creek.

Welcome to the Tuesday, September 15th, 2026 special meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council.

Under California law, public comment and special meetings are limited to subjects on the agenda only.

Therefore, public comments will be received during the item.

The study session item is update on development services team process, improvement projects, and outcomes.

And I invite administrative analyst Kathy Arana and senior planner Ben Schuster forward to provide the presentation.

Hello.

Good afternoon, Mayor Wilk and members of the council.

Thank you all for being here today.

We appreciate the opportunity to share an update on our process improvement efforts.

I'm Kathy Arana, and I'm joined by my colleague Ben Schuster, and we're here on behalf of the entire development services team.

And we will be guiding you, sorry, today through the key insights and outcomes of this improvement work.

Over the past several months, the team has been focused on identifying key opportunities, driving targeted improvements, and building a more efficient process.

Today we're excited to highlight the progress we've made as well as the progress we're starting to see already.

Sorry, as well as the impact we're starting to see already.

Throughout the presentation, we'll be joined by select members from the development services team who will be sharing more about some key insights that are underway.

So I'll be giving a brief introduction of our presenters today.

We have Cassava Washington from the Economic Development Division.

And from our engineering division, we have Ryan Cook.

From our building division, we have Jessica Azevedo and Samantha Sampson.

And from our planning division, we have Alison Rustic, Jessica Gonzalez, and Gerardo Victoria.

With that, we're excited to share with you today a story about our lean green development team.

To start, let's take a moment to recognize and thank everyone who participated in our process improvement efforts.

This work is not easy.

Improvement takes time, and a willingness to really look at how we operate.

Everyone on the team has committed a great deal of time to these efforts, and we know this work is not yet finished.

What is especially meaningful about this effort is that it brought together staff from three different city departments the city manager's office, the public works department, and community development department, as well as multiple divisions building, economic development, engineering, planning, and traffic engineering.

While each group has its primary areas of responsibility, we were able to come together as one development services team, also known as a DST to improve our permitting process.

The core improvement team consists of 33 city staff, including our three executive team sponsors, along with our consultants, partners in public innovation, also known as PPI, and a number of customers who opted to participate to participate in the process.

In addition to this core group, many other members of the DST were also involved with the process improvement efforts.

Many of them are here in the audience today.

And so, what will we discover today?

As we move through today's presentation, we want you to come away with a clear understanding of why we needed to change, what we learned, and where we're going next.

We'll start with what prompted us to take a closer look at the way we do things.

From there, we'll share what we heard directly from our customers because their experiences helped shape where we focused our efforts.

You'll then see how we built a new culture around lean and turn customer feedback into action with the process improvement work.

So by the end of today, we hope you'll not only understand what changed, but also understand why it changed, how we got there, and the difference it's making for our customers already.

And now we're going to hear from Ben about why change is needed.

Thanks, Kathy.

So let's start to unpack why change is needed.

So we as a city, we process many different types and sizes of development applications every year.

And historically, we've faced some challenges in consistently processing those applications due to unclear procedures, poor communication, limited visibility into the approval process, as well as some other challenges.

And these issues have been exacerbated due to a reliance on informal training, a lack of undocumented processes, and extensive staff turnover since the COVID 19 pandemic.

And because our goal as a development services team is to deliver consistent and exceptional customer service throughout the entire permitting process, we needed to reevaluate our business practices and redesign them to meet our current customer needs.

So I think it's important to note that the work we're talking about today is a long time in the making.

And the city started permit process improvement efforts about 10 years ago with the blueprint for success version one and version two.

And those efforts really laid the foundation for today's lean work.

And while those initiatives lost momentum because of the COVID-19 pandemic, that same pandemic also created an opportunity for us to rapidly develop digital service offerings in response to some immediate customer needs.

And then coming out of the pandemic in 2023, the city picked back up its process improvement initiatives with the desire to be nimble and responsive in a post COVID world.

And so that effort culminated in our permit counter refresh in the fall of 2025, excuse me, as well as the start of the lean work that we're sharing today.

So to better understand what those customer needs are in this post-COVID world, we needed to talk to them.

And so we did that through a what we called a voice of the customer session that was facilitated by our consultants, PPI.

And you can see on your screen here some of the feedback that we got from our customers from that session.

And it was a mix of positive and not so positive.

But all of it, I think was really powerful for us as a development services team to hear.

And I think you can kind of see on your screen the key theme that we heard coming out of that session was a lot of fear and frustration around our current process.

And so I think the work that we're undertaking right now is really about how can we move away from a process that our customers fear into one that's going to allow us as a city to meet its potential as the epicenter of the East Bay.

So, how did we actually bring about change?

I think it's really important to note that there's something fundamentally different about this improvement work.