Cleveland has launched an online portal for city permits, a move aimed at making it easier for developers, landlords, businesses and members of the public to file paperwork with City Hall.
With the portal, users can apply online for construction permits, rental registrations, lead-safe certificates, parade permits and a variety of business licenses, for example. Here is a link to the portal along with the city’s instructions on how to use the system.
The new portal is the fruit of more than a year of work updating a system of construction permit reviews that a 2024 study called “lengthy and unpredictable.” Mayor Justin Bibb said in an interview Tuesday that the city gathered feedback from the public and developers of all sizes while putting the portal together.
“It has been a major challenge, but also I think one of our biggest opportunities to modernize City Hall and accelerate development by doing the long hard work that we’ve done over the last 18 months to get this effort across the finish line,” Bibb said.
The city issues more than half of its building permits on the same day as the application, according to Scott Cahill, a customer experience manager in the Building and Housing Department.
But if an application requires multiple levels of review throughout City Hall, the process can take months, he said. In a story published this week, Crain’s Cleveland Business found examples of outliers that took years.
Silos and staffing also an impediment in City Hall, study said
Technology alone was not the only bottleneck that the 2024 study found. Staff in different departments weren’t communicating well enough with each other. Vacancies across City Hall also gummed up the process.
The city has a lot of paperwork to manage. Cleveland receives an average of more than 7,800 construction permit applications each year, the study found.
Bibb said the permit overhaul also focused on “change management” — that is, changing how staff handle the permit applications once they receive them.
“Getting everybody in one room to talk about what’s working and what’s not working has gone a long way,” he said.
A ‘digital plan room’ for construction designs
One of the portal’s big selling points is a “digital plan room” that could break down City Hall’s siloed approach to construction permits. Developers can now submit their plans for review by multiple city departments in one place online.
Previously, they would have to circulate copies of their construction plans around City Hall to collect the approvals they needed, Cahill said. Now, city departments can leave their comments on the digital plans in the portal, rather than sending separate emails back to the developer, he said.
“It’s also huge for us to not have to be passing paper around the city,” Cahill said. “It saves a lot of time from trying to get plans sets to different people so that they can actually look and review them.”
The city built the portal using new features provided by Accela, the system it was already using to track property and permit information. Future versions of the portal might incorporate such tools as an artificial intelligence assistant, Cahill said.
Paying Cleveland’s ‘technical debt’
Cleveland isn’t done updating the permitting process. The city maintains an online dashboard tracking the overhaul project. More than half of the work is still in progress, and about 30% of it hasn’t yet started. The city plans to digitize old records and study its permit fees, for instance.
Bibb — who recently said he plans to have city workers trained on how to use AI — said that the city has to overcome the “technical debt” of its old systems.
“You just can’t flip a switch and have a digital permitting platform, unfortunately,” Bibb said. “It takes a lot to turn around these antiquated legacy technology systems. And so we want to be in a position where we go from being in technical debt to having a technical surplus.”
In social media posts, Bibb asked readers to email him at mayorbibb@clevelandohio.gov with their own thoughts about the permit process, whether it has “burned” them or worked in their favor.
