and services permitting improvement plan. Yes, thank you very much, Mayor. This is an item that you have heard some information about and we have presented to you some of the ideas. We wanted to bring this back in a more formal presentation so that we could outline some of our successful strategies to the public and invite them to participate in the permitting process. If I could call on our director of building services and I see Greg Garcy is here this evening too, Greg, I hardly ever see you. Brad, if you would be so kind as to take the lead, thank you very much. Thank you. Mayor Vice Mayor, commissioners, it's an honor to be before you this evening. I want to introduce the people that are to my left and right, to my left is Pat Richardson. He is the vice assistant building official, and to my right is Greg Garsey, been with the city many, many years, and he's the operations manager for permitting. I guess I have to introduce myself again, I'm Brad Ostrop with Building and Community Services and tonight we're going to present Building and Permitting Improvement Plan. So to go over what we're going to talk about tonight. We're going to talk really talk about the conversion of electronic permitting, also electronic inspection scheduling, some of the trends that we've seen in permitting over the last few years, some challenges that we identified, and really we're identified for us and some process improvements that we spoke about. In February of this year, we fully implemented electronic permitting. And it was huge for the department and for the city. You remember you used to have to take a permanent application and those big permits You had you had to come to the building department you had a fill out an application and you had to Give up those big plans no more. Do you have to do that? now You can go to our website on the building services website on on the city website and you can upload your application and your plans and all associated documents right into the portal. Once you do that you can see on the right hand side a process flow chart the green is the applicant red, is what staff does, and staff will verify that you have all the right permit, you're applying for the right permit, you have all the right information, and it will then be released. It'll be electronic or we routed to up to 10 disciplines that are involved in the review process simultaneously. Before we were able to do this, this was a consecutive process. In other words, you had the plans, it went to whatever trades were involved in approving the permit, one at a time. So if it went to plumbing, plumbing reviewed it, if it needed corrections or comments, they put it on there, then it went to the next discipline. And so this took a long time, and you heard some of those last commission meetings. So this is a real improvement. Also in plan review so once the permits once the plans go through then the reviewer because they're comments the customers are notified via email that there's either corrections or that their permit is ready. They can pay online. They can download their plans or use their plans electronically stamped and sealed online. Inspections have been improved also. They all inspections can be scheduled. Once you complete your work or that part of your work in your plans, you would schedule a permit, excuse me, an inspection on our website or you can phone in and schedule an inspection. If you schedule that inspection before 3 p.m. that day, in most cases, the next day an inspector will be out conducting that inspection. They will call you. They will set up a two hour window and they will come and do the inspection. They will also do the inspection electronically on a device. So it's done. There's no waiting long periods of time. It's loaded right into the portal. And you can, the applicant can follow that process in the portal. I think we covered all that. I also wanted to talk to you about some permitting trends. So we pulled permits all the way back to, sorry, all the way back to 2020. You had about 2400 plus permits. You saw in 2021 that rose to 3,800 and that was due to Oak Tree and Bliss coming online. Park and parcel of that. All the way to 2022 where our bond projects started coming online and Oak Project came online. To 2023 where the sky building permits came online and then we're estimating as you see in physically year 2024 that will have about 3783 permits. That really equates to about 300 permits plus a month and with those permits comes all the reviews that are required and all the inspections that are required. So as well as other entities in the city, we're very busy. I came to the department in the end of January 2023. And over those days, I listened. I watched. What were the processes? What did our customers have to say? How is it working and how can we improve it? And the first thing that we really noticed was in order to be successful, we had to cut the duration of the plan review. It had to be cut. And therefore, the electronic permitting affords us some movement on that. Enhance communication with our customers. You're going to see ways that we do that, but it's important that they understand, you know, we understand what they're going through and they understand what our expectations are. So they can be leveled off. Ensure that the reviews and inspections are standardized to the point where however we can take subjectivity out of the process we do and all this to increase the process efficiency. So how are we going to do that? Mayor Rosenwald talked about this last commission meeting. We've implemented checklist both for inspections and reviews to standardize it to the point that we possibly can. So each discipline, each inspector and each reviewer has those checklists. Same inspector protocol. To further remove subjectivity, we want the same inspector of the same discipline to do subsequent reviews if they're necessary and subsequent inspections. And that way it further reduces that subjectivity. Reports to track initiatives so we can see how we're doing and looking at best practices that other cities do that were able to glean, OJT on the job training, T.E.U. credits as a matter of fact, Sierra and Nasr are with me today in the audience when the public comments from the CRA occurred last commission meeting. Renée was kind enough to download that excerpt for me and the entire building watched those comments. And we spoke about them afterwards. Increasing communication is part of the next metric, which is having meetings on larger scope projects, pre-construction during construction, and prior to getting your CO or your TCO, understanding what the expectations are, getting all the right people at the table to speak about what their issues are and what expectations are. If a denial occurs in a discipline through a reviewer and inspection three times, then we wanna sit down with that applicant and we want to discuss between our staff and the applicant, the customer, the owner, what's occurring and how we can get this plan through the process. The Florida Building Code uses a benchmark of 30 days. A permit is measured going through the process 30 days. Our benchmark is 20 days. And I get reports every month that tells me how well we're doing, how many permits are exceeding that, how many permits, what the percentage of permits are that made it 20 days and before and that allows us to dig deeper if we need to and see what the issue is. And then a monthly review of processes and procedures. So we talked about reducing time and how critical those review times were, the consistency of reviews and how critical that is, streamlining our permitting process and what we've done through electronic permitting to help us in that manner. Enhancing communication with not only the contractor with the owner and with the tenant is critical. We're collecting that information up front in the portal so we can communicate with them as the process goes forward. And continuous evaluation of the process. Had an opportunity last month to attend the downtown partners meeting at Black Flamingo. So a lot of things that you heard, I spoke to the owners of Black Flamingo, I spoke to many of the other business owners that were there and explained what we're doing to address some of the issues that they had. The next part of that listening process is going to be an Oakland Park business partners forum, moderated by Jane Bowling, former mayor. It'll be Tuesday, August 13th, from 839-30, a code ninjas, 3421 North Dixie. And that'll give business and stakeholders the opportunity to talk to us as a city and tell us how we can improve and continue that process of improvement and for us to discuss with them. So that's it.