02-18-13 Special Meeting of La Porte City Council

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2. Allow contractors to open escrow accounts against which permit fees can be charged to eliminate the need for recurring checks and trips to city hall to pay for trade type permits. 3. Ensure that building plan review turn -around time goals are established and enforced for all staff members involved with plan review. 4. Establish and enforce a policy that additional comments will not be added on resubmittals. Exception: when the applicant has made changes to the plans subsequent to the prior submittal. 5. Redundant paper logs should be eliminated with the data being retrieved from NaviLine when needed. There are multiple paper logs used for tracking various permit applications and the status of those applications. Examples include: permits issued log (tracks applications during plan review), over the counter log (tracks resubmittals and other delivered documents), roof permits log, temporary and portable sign log, clearing/fill dirt/storm water quality log, new code enforcement case log, and a follow up code enforcement log. Periodically, the data on these logs are typed into a spreadsheet for archiving, but the original paper logs are also maintained. Additionally, there is a separate database maintained for water and sewer taps. Most of the information entered on the logs is also entered into NaviLine as part of the process to set up the permit file in the system. If NaviLine is incapable of appropriately tracking the review steps, a separate database should be set up in place of the paper logs, so that the tracking information can be easily entered, updated, queried, and accessed from the network by all staff members. The database should be set up to track the info needed for the various permit types, but only require the relevant data fields for the particular permit type. The database should also be made available to the public so that applicants can see the review status of their applications. 6. The Inspections Services Technicians should log Planning Division -related applications, such as site plans and zone changes. A consistent logging process as described above should be developed for all Planning Department applications to eliminate the differentiation between processes for each division. 7. Ensure the plan review comments from outside the Planning Department are coordinated with the comments from within the department and returned to the applicant simultaneously from a single source with the Planning Department comments. 11 Planning Department Review Mueller Management/Ron Cox Consulting