Honolulu Permit Department Shutters Doors to Deal with “Substantial Backlog”

After the introduction of new multimillion-dollar permitting software called HNL Build this past August, applications started to build up in Honolulu’s permitting department. Now the 800+ application backlog is so bad that the department is closing its doors and shutting off its phones for a week in an effort to catch up. Permit applications are still accepted online during the closure. 

Honolulu Civil Beat reports the story as part of their ongoing series, Permit Pileup, that chronicles the notoriously troubled permitting department. 

“Before HNL Build, DPP was prescreening plans in one to five days, [department spokesman Davis] Pitner said. It’s now a month and two weeks behind and working to get back to where it was,” Christina Jedra writes in the HCB.  A staff survey showed that employees “begged for a return to the previous system, with one worker calling HNL Build a ‘complete failure.’” 

The next phase of DPP’s tech upgrades is slated to be the introduction of a program called CivCheck, which relies on artificial intelligence and aims to reduce processing time by up to 70 percent.