Say the word “permitting” to anybody in Hawaii County who has had any interaction with our beleaguered system whatsoever, and blood pressures spike while words unfit for print arise out of the mouths of otherwise aloha-filled residents. Permitting on the Big Island is indeed an aloha-killer.
This is news to no one in the county who works with the system and, to their credit, county administration is in the process of doing something about the dysfunction.
There are several fixes in the works, and one of the biggest is the county’s move to a new digital system for building permits and planning applications. This is not new information as the new system, EnerGov, a platform provided by Tyler Technologies currently being utilized by more than 600 government entities nationally, has been in the process of customization and in the news for quite a while now.
EnerGov was supposed to go live last year … the spring of this year … the summer … and now is scheduled to go live in mid-November, although “there is a risk” in considering that date to be written in stone, according to Project Manager Sheila Cadaoas.
But, keeping our fingers crossed and holding on tightly to our shamrocks for luck, let’s say we hit that date. It’s not like just flicking a switch and expecting the neurons in our business community’s brains to light up so that we instantly know how to navigate this new system. Any change requires preparation — and a change of this magnitude that has so much riding on it and so many moving parts requires that in spades.
In a recent meeting with the Kona Kohala Chamber of Commerce’s Permitting Task Force, the county outlined the rollout schedule for EnerGov implementation. The first task the county faces in developing outreach is to identify the user groups they need to reach. They have done that, and those are: 1. the professionals who work with building issues on a daily basis, like architects and draftspeople; 2. the builders who rely on resolution of the multitude of permitting steps to get projects off the ground; and 3. the place where the buck stops, the owners and developers who are financing projects.
Internal tweaking and internal user testing will continue until Sept. 20, at which time the system will be opened to a select group of public users who will begin testing the system by running test permits and applications through it. The county is hoping to recruit five to six of these users on each side of the island and the Permitting Task Force is helping to facilitate that recruitment in West Hawaii. Glitches uncovered by these testers will be fed back to the county on an ongoing basis for about a month, and the county will debug the system of the glitches they uncover.
Then in mid-October, the system will be opened for general public user training.
My understanding is that the county met last week to hammer out the details of that training, and the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce’s Permitting Task Force will do its best to alert the West Hawaii community to them in a timely manner. Then, on the magic date of Nov. 12 — remember, not written in stone: a potentially (probably?) movable date — the system goes live and Hawaii County enters a brave new world of transparency in the permit process and, hopefully, expedited deliverables.
We all know that permitting truly does take a regulatory village, and information from the county is that the other inhabitants of that village, namely the Fire Department, and the departments of Health and Wastewater, will also be participating in EnerGov. This is extremely encouraging, as development doesn’t exist in a silo, and just fixing the Building Division process doesn’t totally fix the problem, so it’s good news that these players will all be on the same platform.
Now, caveats to all this stars-in-our-eyes possibility: electronic review of plans, which is the holy grail of a digital system, is not going to be implemented immediately. That will come later, as will concurrent review of plans, which allows several pairs of eyes to review a single plan at the same time, and also electronic plan submission with, hopefully, digital signatures.
So, until that time we do indeed have an upgrade of the current situation, but in no way the extent of the upgrade that needs to happen for significant improvement in permitting.
According to the county’s spokesperson, Denise Laitinen, “the details of rolling out eReview are still being worked out … and the Building Division is currently reviewing other digital plan submittal standards around the country.”
So, some steps forward, and welcome steps indeed. We’re not there yet, but it looks like we’re finally on the path.
Dennis Boyd is the director of the West Hawaii Small Business Development Center, which is funded in part through the U.S. Small Business Administration and the University of Hawaii at Hilo.