Cincinnati

The City of Cincinnati was facing serious customer service obstacles. The permitting process was decentralized. Individual departments controlled specific knowledge on each permit. A single construction project could involve as many as seven different departments. Every department had its own systems, process and fee schedule. Residents and small business owners were left to navigate this their own— which led to high call volumes, emails and extensive counter visits at each step of the way. It could take weeks to figure out what permits were needed. No one was happy about this. Permitting, a central function of all governments, was creating a huge annual, unrecoverable loss of critical staff time for the City.

Given these challenges, the Mayor set out to discover a simple, cost-efficient and transparent way for homeowners, special event planners and entrepreneurs to quickly discover permit requirements without visiting City Hall. The task was assigned to the Office of Performance and Data Analytics, who looked nationwide for examples of what other communities had done to solve this challenge. Several cities stood out for their user friendly and simple interface, including Oakland, Indianapolis and Asheville. The team suspected all three of the communities shared one thing in common, they had worked with OpenCounter. The project team invited OpenCounter to do a demo for the seven permitting-focused departments, the City Manager and the Chief Procurement Officer. At the end of that first hour, It was unanimous. They loved it, and then they sole sourced it.

In the past year, the city has serviced 27,899 residential and business permit inquiries through their new OpenCounter portals. Permit discovery emails, calls and counter visits have fallen and the City estimates they have freed up 5,765 staff hours to devote to higher value-added activities. No internal workflows were changed, no policies were altered.