PermitView - An Innovative, Cost Effective Solution

About the Program

Category: Planning (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

Development and building permitting rules greatly depend on where a property is, and how it relates to its neighbors. This ‘sense of place’ can be lost in the tables and screens of a permit information system. While staff has maps at its disposal to help them understand the land and its relation to the permit information, the public does not. In response to this problem, San Luis Obispo County initiated their PermitView program, which attempts to resolve this issue by providing a dynamically created map of the property and its neighbors when viewing permit or property information over the web. This map not only helps locate the property ‘in space’, i.e. in relation to its neighboring properties, it makes it very easy for the user to both identify and explore the neighboring properties. PermitView brings together information from two very disparate systems. The permitting system contains property and project information that has a high value to the public, but lacks spatial context. The GIS system contains property and road maps that can provide spatial context for the permit information system data. By displaying data from both systems at the same time, PermitView attempts to help make the data more relevant and understandable to the end user. In the second full year that the program was in place, the county experienced a 2000 count drop in public contacts relative to the year prior to implementation, or about a 7% reduction in the number of calls and visits from the public.