As communities look forward to longer days and summer weather, these months often coincide with municipal staff and councilors taking a much-needed break themselves.
While municipal staff take their vacations, the ongoing flow of permits, planning requests, and licenses do not.
For citizens, summer is a chance to make long-awaited home improvements, cool off in the pool, and head to fairs, concerts, and outdoor events. This requires municipalities across North America to balance the expectations of providing high levels of service and satisfy eager citizens with limited staff availability.
ePermitting software is an excellent way to maintain high-quality service delivery, stay connected with the community, and reduce labour intensity to keep up with citizen demands. Below, we explore some of the ways that ePermitting solutions can support your municipality’s summer staffing needs.
1. Streamlined Intake of Permits
Adopting ePermitting software can revolutionize the permitting and licensing process in your community. A highly integrated cloud-based platform such as Citywide Permitting allows citizens, businesses, and nonprofits to access all permit templates, resources, and detailed instructions in one online place. ePermitting eliminates the need to pick up paper forms from your offices, navigate between separate web pages, or search through seemingly endless permit resources. For municipal staff, the information submitted through a robust ePermitting web portal is accessible by administrative teams in real-time, allowing them to clearly see which information may be incomplete, easily access permits in progress, and edit each permit template.
2. Time Savings for you and your Citizens
With traditional permitting processes, applicants and municipalities can spend hours searching for and organizing resources and necessary paperwork for each applicant. ePermitting streamlines this process through pre-populated forms, the elimination of print forms, and simplified communication. Applicants no longer need to search through municipal directories to find the right contact information, and municipal staff won’t have to sift through a multitude of pages of emails or printed sheets to find specific applicants’ details. Instead, ePermitting platforms automatically connect staff with the citizens who need their support through the Customer Portal’s one-stop-shop webpage, offering an open channel of communication through the application itself – saving time for everyone involved.
3. Lower labour intensity to account for summer vacations and limited staff capacity
Processing permits during the summer can be a laborious process, with many events, home improvements, and construction projects naturally accompanying the warmer weather. With ePermitting removing many of the non-value-added processes typically included in permitting through automation and real-time data sharing, municipal staff can focus on what really matters: working with citizens to have as many successful projects as possible. As staff take vacations and municipalities face labour shortages, this is more important than ever. ePermitting allows teams to manage the summer’s uptick in permitting requests without compromising quality.
4. Less Backlog in the Fall
ePermitting allows municipalities’ staff to enjoy the summer without the stress of facing a backlog in the fall. Delaying permit processing until the fall simply reduces the value of the summer months and the time spent re-energizing for the demands of the fall. With highly integrated software, time savings, and lower labour intensity, municipal teams can be confident that even as the sun shines, they will return to a manageable workload.
5. Maintain Exceptional Levels of Service
As municipalities seek rest after a busy season of budgeting, ePermitting provides a crucial solution by allowing government staff to stay connected with citizens and maintain a high level of service. This supportive software ensures that essential channels of communication remain open despite limited staff capacity. Municipalities leveraging ePermitting can uphold citizen expectations for strong service delivery, ensuring that even when staff members are on leave, the quality and efficiency of public services remain uncompromised.
Final Words
ePermitting software is a transformative solution that allows municipalities to make the most of the summer. While staff capacity is constrained by vacation time, summer permit requests grow to take advantage of the warm outdoor weather. ePermitting software serves as a streamlined, communicative, and accessible solution that allows municipalities to maintain exceptional levels of service despite the labour challenges that the summer months present. If you are interested in revolutionizing the way that your organization approaches summer permits, our team is ready to help you take the next step.
