From the book “Cultivating a Smart Valley: A History of Smart Valley, Inc.” by Justine Cogan, Smart Valley Press, 1998 (pgs. 31-34) SMART PERMITTING If you want the business sector to grow, get ready for it to expand. Such was the thinking behind Smart Valley's Smart Permitting initiative. In the fall of 1994, Smart Valley called a meeting of leaders from government and industry to discuss what could be done electronically to improve the building permit process. The report from industry revealed that the cost of delaying building for corporations was enormous. A representative from Hewlett-Packard estimated that the company lost $1 million for every month that a permit was delayed. The team came up with a plan to streamline the permitting process by doing it via the Internet. Designed to coordinate cities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in developing and implementing network-based electronic permitting systems, the project used the Internet to facilitate the process of applying for and receiving building permits. The project initially involved Andersen Consulting and the City of Palo Alto in a demonstration prototype permitting system on the Internet. This prototype was developed in the spring of 1995. The project had two separate but related focuses. One addressed which software systems city/county entities would utilize to manage their permitting process, and the second addressed online access to this software system. The demonstration prototype used City of Palo Alto building applications and contained a searchable archive of the building code and other relevant city information to assist in completing the forms. It also incorporated security, workflow, and status checking features. Following the completion of the prototype, a Smart Permitting Steering Committee was formed composed of city managers, corporate facility managers, architect and design engineers, building inspectors, city planners, and technology specialists. Representatives from 18 Bay Area cities and two counties participated on a subcommittee to deal with permitting software systems. In August 1995, the software systems subcommittee produced the "Systems Requirements for Smart Permitting." This document was reviewed by permitting software vendors and the final version was approve d and adopted by participating cities. The "Systems Requirement" document became the basis for a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) that was mailed to ten permitting software vendors. Nine of the ten vendors responded and the results of the evaluation process were released and posted to Smart Valley's website in September. Cities then became involved in a procurement process on an individual and collective basis. On September 25, 1996, Smart Valley conducted two live prototype demonstrations for over 500 corporate facility managers, engineers, architects, and city officials. The demos used the Internet and a standard "dial up" connection showcasing existing technology used for permitting.
The first demonstration was courtesy of Associated Computer Aided Design (CAD) Services of Burlingame and Quarterdeck. In a virtual conference between the City of San Carlos, Ehrlich Rominger of Los Altos (architect), and the audience at the Sunnyvale facility of Lockheed Martin, a CAD drawing was simultaneously reviewed on a real time basis, code violations were discussed, the drawing marked up and modified, and agreements documented and archived. The second demo was between the City of Sunnyvale and the Lockheed Martin audience. Again, on a real time basis, building permit appl ication forms were downloaded, completed, and submitted along with a CAD drawing. The group discovered code violations and resubmitted a modified drawing. Permits were then issued and billed. Keypoint of San Jose provided the Internet-compatible forms. Having demonstrated the practicality of technology to implement permitting and the power of standard forms and processes, in January, 1997, the Smart Permitting project was handed over to Joint Venture: Silicon Valley and became "Smart Permit." Under Joint Venture's direction, the first operational unit of the online permit system was launched in October 1997, in Sunnyvale, using internally-developed software. The city of San Carlos led the effort for vendor-provided software. Smart Permit's focus at the time of this printing is a new wave of pilot cities: San Carlos, Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Milpitas. The Smart Permitting project brought a new group into the fold for Smart Valley. City governments collaborated for the first, but not last, time at Smart Valley. Cities and regions throughout the state, across the US, and around the world, have expressed great interest in Smart Permitting and the way Smart Valley developed the system requirements, RFP, live demonstrations, processes and procedures. "The project was not just about permitting processes," says Steve Gunn, Smart Valley's Permitting Project Director and liaison to JV:SV's Smart Permit project. "More importantly, it was about how communities and regions could collaborate to solve problems. It was about how cities could effectively interact with their constituencies. Smart Permitting creates the infrastructure and emphasis on the `twenty-four hour, seven day-a-week' city hall."