Pitch Promises Paperless Problem-Solving

A code inspector notices a leaky roof, or a contractor working without a permit. Instead of reaching for a pen and a pad of paper, she uses a tablet and internet-assisted camera to document the problem — which then shows up on a map shared with otherproblem-solvers.

City officials laid out that tech-assisted utopia as they convinced alders to advance two Information Technology contracts.

At the end of a three-hour meeting in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall, the Board of Alders Finance Committee unanimously endorsed the city Chief Administrative Officer’s (CAO) proposal for the city to enter into a two-year agreement with the web-based permitting and licensing provider, Municity Software.

The committee also unanimously supported the city controller’s recommendation that the city enter into a three-year enhanced agreement with the digital mapping service, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

“The goal here is to maximize efficiency with this permitting system,” Acting CAO Sean Matteson said in support of the proposed Municity contract, ​“to be able to create an atmosphere where employees are able to become untethered to paper, and to eliminate a significant amount of data entry time.”

“I would conservatively say that 90 percent of the data and information that the city generates is tied to a location and a physical space,” city Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst Alfredo Herrera said later in the evening in support of the proposed ESRI contract. ​“So why not use the best tools available to display that and show it in its true context?”

Both proposed contracts now advance to the full Board of Alders for a final vote.

The two proposed IT contracts come at a time when the city has ramped up its use of data, mapping, and internet-based information management systems to analyze, and even predict, opioid overdoses and to plan, and follow up on, interdepartmental neighborhood walks and inspections.

Herrera, working out of City Controller Daryl Jones’s office, has played a key role in developing some of the public-facing and backend mapping applications that aggregate information on crime, blight, traffic collisions, fires, city vehicle locations, homeless encampments, medical emergencies, more on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, property-by-property basis. Click here to view one of his public-facing applications, which collects ownership and assessment data on parcels of located throughout the city.

On Tuesday night, he, Jones, and Acting City Budget Director Michael Gormany explained that almost all of the city’s electronic mapping work takes place on ESRI.

But, he added, the city’s current license of the mapping software allows for very limited use.

The city has 12 desktop licenses, he said, 20 on-premise web licenses, and 13 cloud-based licenses to use ESRI. Because of the limited nature of the city’s current license, he said, different city officials who could benefit from tracking, analyzing, and acting on map-based data can’t use the system simply because the city doesn’t have enough licenses to go around.

Herrera said that he routinely has to pull a crime statistics GIS report out of ESRI at 6 a.m. so that he can log out early enough and not overlap with police administrators who need to use the credentials for their own day-to-day work.

Herrera, Jones, and Gormany pitched the alders on a three-year licensing of ESRI’s enterprise GIS program, which would provide the city with over 1,000 licenses for each level of ESRI access. The enhanced agreement would cost $111,000 per year, Gormany said, with the first year’s payment coming out of the IT capital budget and the subsequent years’ costs coming out of the general fund.

“Really the GIS is the underpinning of a lot of the information systems that are in the city,” Herrera said. ​“We have not really until recently used it in that way. But now that we’ve started to do so, we’re seeing better decisions being made as far as when we go out to do the sweeps. We’re better informed as to where to target and put our resources. We can better manage our assets. We can better capture what’s going on in the city in real time.”

Earlier in the evening, Matteson, Deputy CAO Maggie Targove, CAO Intern Kayla Wallace, and Building Official Jim Turcio pitched alders on another new tech contract that would build off of the mapping software Herrera works on to ease city officials’ and residents’ processing of building permits and inspections.

That proposed contract is with Municity, a web-based electronic permitting software that would allow city officials to complete inspections and issue permits from the field, and allow members of the public to apply for, pay for, and track building permits without having to come in person to City Hall.

“This is a move to get the city away from paper and to a more digital atmosphere,” Matteson said. The proposed contract is for two years, and the training and implementation would cost $365,504 in capital funding from a variety of city departments. He and and Targove said that, if the city were to continue with Municity beyond the initial two-year deal, the city would have to pay an annual maintenance fee of $80,000.

Matteson and Targove said the city plans to set up the the Building Department and the Assessor’s Office in Municity first, and then will follow up by integrating nearly a dozen other departments that have licensing, permitting, and inspection functions, including the anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI), the Health Department, the Police Department, and Transportation, Traffic, & Parking (TTP).

“This is our fourth permitting system since I’ve been here,” Turcio said. ​“And hopefully the last one.”

He said the current system, ViewPermit, lacks adequate training and support, and has aged into a legacy software. Few city officials use it, he said, and building inspectors currently rely on paper notes that they have to bring down to City Hall to file electronically after completing their inspections.

With Municity, he said, inspectors will be able to complete building inspections from a tablet with internet access while still out in the field.

The new software will also allow members of his department to verify that property taxes and permit fees have been paid, he said, and will allow members of the public to apply for a permit easily online.

Dixwell Alder Jeannette Morrison expressed concern that the city might have incorrect information on whether or not an applicant is up to speed on his property taxes, and therefore might unfairly deny him a building permit.

Matteson acknowledged that there are and will inevitably be some mistakes involving all data that the city collects. But managing this data in a central, accessible, web-based location, he said, will make it all the easier to fix if and when the city does get something wrong.

“I’d be lying if I were to say that it’s going to be 100 percent correct 100 percent of the time,” he said. ​“But it’s going to be a whole hell of a lot better than what it is now.”

At the end of the night, all of the alders on the committee, including Morrison, voted in support of both proposed IT contracts.

“I think that this is a good thing,” Morrison said about Municity. ​“It’s about time we were coming up to the ages of utilizing software and not mandating people to come in person to do things that they can do online.”

East Rock Alder Anna Festa agreed in her support for the ESRI contract.

“I believe that this is the transparency that some of our residents have been asking for,” she said. ​“Anything to do with licensing and city software that will enhance city services is a positive thing.”