Cape Coral works to shore up construction permitting system
Cape Coral officials are considering improvements to its online permitting system, EnerGov, to avoid any future pauses in accepting permit applications or another massive backlog.
City Manager Roberto Hernandez said EnerGov partly contributed to the backlog issues that led to the nine-day freeze on new permit applications between April 9 and April 17.
"I understand the industry is frustrated. We are equally frustrated. We want to get this thing right. We don't like having unhappy customers, and we don't like having glitches in our system where permits are being unnecessarily delayed," Hernandez said.
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The Cape Coral Construction Industry Association had no comment on the status of permitting in Cape Coral since the freeze.
The city of Cape Coral began using EnerGov on Feb. 21 to handle all permitting across the city. TrakIT was the software the city used previously, and eTRAKiT was the online portal contractors used.
Matt Grambow, special project coordinator in the city manager's office, presented to the city council late last month major issues that can be improved.
Grambow said the city will be looking at streamlining many permit processes starting with roofing permits, for which the city receives 600-700 applications per week.
"It's a good first option for reconfiguration within EnerGov because it's not the most complicated type of permit to do and there's a large volume," Grambow said.
He said it will help the city prepare to address single-family home permits, the backlog of which has caused the most issues for the city.
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Staff is being trained in generating reports, preparing outreach materials to inform customers on how to process their permits online, and submitting weekly memos on how they are addressing the issues.
"It's really important for us throughout this process as we are addressing the different issues to engage with the community, engage with the users to make sure we are doing all that we can to collaborate and work to decrease permit times because that's what everyone wants to do," Grambow said.
Staff is also considering hiring a third-party consultant to improve EnerGov's performance and will hire at least one additional permit coordinators, who will handle the volume of permits, and one IT EnerGov administrator, who will monitor and operate the system.
Salaries and cost of these new positions have yet to be determined.
According to Kaitlyn Pearson, the city's spokeswoman, the pause in new applications helped the city government process the almost 5,000 backed-up applications to the low hundreds.
In the week after the pause ended, the city had a total of 306 permits applications on that Monday and issued an average of 202 permits for the following days.
Nine employees from the Development Services Department also worked on Easter Sunday to reduce the backlog.
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Pearson said EnerGov, the city's system, is being continuously improved for better system performance.
"The city is taking a comprehensive approach to address issues with permit processing times, focusing on hardware improvements, software optimization, process, and configuration streamlining, and additional hiring and training to efficiently process the near-record number of new permit applications," Pearson said in an email to The News-Press.
She added that residents should utilize the city's self-service platform.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: What's the status of Cape Coral construction permitting
