LA’s push for modernization looks to spur housing development, reduce agency costs
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A centralized portal for permitting services, experts say, will help the city streamline the application and approval process and could set the stage for other municipalities to follow.
One of the biggest U.S. cities is modernizing its permitting system to accelerate housing development, reduce government expenditures and improve customer experience.
In 2023, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety processed more than 167,000 permits, conducted more than 1 million building inspections and approved more than 83,000 plans. But to keep up with customer demand, city officials saw a need to offer residents and businesses an easier way to interact with the municipality and its services.
The agency is now transforming its legacy permitting system into a central platform where customers can access all permitting services that were previously spread across various agencies. The platform, which will be available 24/7, will offer residents and businesses a single point of entry to start, pay for and track the status of building permit applications.
According to Cyrus Symoom, co-CEO of Clariti Software, the company supporting the modernization of Los Angeles’ permitting, the city’s 35-year-old system still runs on COBOL, an outdated computer programming language designed in 1959 that has shrinkingly few proficient programmers.
“It is super disparate, where every department has a different database, and as an applicant, you are logging into multiple interfaces to track different permits,” Symoom said.
Plus, the city’s current permitting services are only available certain times during the week, he added, which creates “a really painful, time-consuming system.”
For LADBS staff, the modernization effort aims to streamline application reviews, building inspections and the approval process.
The central platform can help reduce cybersecurity risks and costs for the city, said Manju Naglapur, senior vice president and general manager at the technology solutions company Unisys, who is partnering with Clariti for the initiative.
“When you are maintaining multiple systems,” particularly when they reach end of life, he said, “the first blazing risk is going to be security…. That means you are spending more dollars to keep all of these [systems] secure.”
A more efficient permitting portal could reduce call volume for city staff who have to field customers’ questions about their applications, for instance, because the updated system will be easier for users to navigate, Symoom added.
The updated system will also automate part of the application review and inspection process, freeing up staff’s time to focus on higher priority tasks, and provide the city with more permitting-related data, such as how many backlogged permits there are in the system, the average processing time of applications and which inquiries take more or less time to be processed.
Those insights can help city officials improve permitting services and inform new building development regulations, Symoom said, adding that “we’re now seeing a shift where senior leaders are really seeing the necessity for change, and they’re willing to endure the multiyear … process to get there.”
“When a city like LA commits to modernizing their system, it sends a powerful message to other municipalities,” he said. Los Angeles’ modernization push could “trigger a wave where we’re going to see a big acceleration of large governments … adopting new solutions.”
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