Facing a growing number of applications for building permits and persistent complaints about the process, the city of Jacksonville is adding staffing to the Building Inspection Division and rolling out a new online tool for submitting, processing and tracking permits.
Mayor Donna Deegan spotlighted the new online portal, jaxepics.coj.net, and announced the new staffing at a Jan. 10. news conference.
“As I’ve met with small-business owners, both during my campaign and certainly during my time as mayor, I’ve heard one thing over and over again: It just takes too darn long to get a permit in Jacksonville,” Deegan said.
The new online tool – formally called Jacksonville Enterprise Permitting, Inspections and Compliance System – was soft-launched in December with the goals of reducing applicants’ waiting times and making the permitting process more efficient.
A request to add 10 positions was approved by the Mayor’s Budget Review Committee and will be sent to the City Council for final approval. Joshua Gideon, chief of the Building Inspection Division, said six of those positions would be for building inspections, with the other four focused on development services.
In addition, Deegan said the city had contracted with the engineering company Bureau Veritas for four plan reviewers to help handle overflow.
Gideon said the short-term goal was to reduce processing times to 20 days for commercial reviews, down from the current average of 30 days, and 15 days for residential projects, down from 25-30 days.
Gideon said the new staff and portal would reduce bottlenecks caused by permits being filed without a full set of the various forms and information needed for procession. When incomplete applications are filed, he said, it forces a back-and-forth between staff and applicants that adds time to the process.
The portal can be accessed by computer or mobile device and offers a dashboard that can be used to upload blueprints and other necessary documents, check on progress of their applications, schedule inspections and more. In addition, members of the public can use the site to get information on permits and the city can use it to better monitor the permitting process to see where problems are occurring.
“That way we can better understand if delays are on the city side, if we’re waiting on the business for some documentation, or if there are steps for a specific permit type that need streamlining,” Deegan said. “We believe that JAXEPICS and these process improvements will significantly reduce the average time it takes to get a permit approved over the next six months, and we will now be able to accurately measure that progress.”
Wanyonyi Kendrick, the city’s chief information officer, said the system was developed in-house at an estimated 40% cost savings over the price of contracting with an outside developer. Kendrick said vendor costs were projected at about $9 million.
The city processes about 9,000 permit applications per month.