Dallas’ Development Services Department said it plans to demo its new commercial permit dashboard to the City’s Economic Development Committee before debuting it publicly at the end of January.
“We’re still working to clean out stale permits,” Development Services Department (DSD) director Andrew Espinoza told members of the committee during a meeting this month.
He said there is still a large number of permits lingering in DSD’s queue that are older than 180 days. Therefore, to fully clear the system of these stale permits, Espinoza said DSD must manually go in to notify the customer and expire the permit.
“If we leave those permits in there, it will impact our overall turnaround time once we launch our commercial dashboard,” Espinoza told committee members. “And so, our goal was to launch that this month and to give each one of you an invite to review that in advance — in a demo format.”
Though DSD’s commercial permit dashboard is technically ready to demo to City officials, Espinoza said the department is working with the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (DBI) on alternative ways to clear the stale permit data before the official demonstration.
“We want to continue working on our commercial permitting dashboard and release that this month,” he said.
However, Espinoza admitted the release “may be delayed a little bit.” He said he would promptly inform the committee of any changes if delays occur.
“There is still some cleaning up between the old system and the new system, so we wanted to project real numbers and numbers that really reflect what’s going on in the department,” said Assistant City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry during the meeting.
“I didn’t feel those numbers were there yet. So, we are probably looking at a month or a couple of months to bring the dashboard in,” he said.
If the release of the new dashboard gets pushed back again, chances are, it will be released around March, the same time DSD plans to increase its permit fees.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, DSD under City Manager T.C. Broadnax has suffered periodic permitting backlogs and various inefficiencies in operations that have cost builders and inhibited various development projects around the city.
