Cleveland processes nearly $2 billion in construction permits every year. For a long time, doing that meant paper plan sets, siloed departments, and a phenomenon locals called the “city hall crawl”, contractors and developers making repeated trips downtown just to figure out where their project stood.
That’s changing fast.
In this episode of Civic Innovators, Kimberly Roy Wilson, Director of Information Technology, and Sally Martin O’Toole, Director of Building and Housing, share how Cleveland is overhauling its permitting process from moving to the cloud, deploying a citywide electronic plan room, to using real-time KPI dashboards to drive daily accountability across the city’s most complex projects.
In This Episode
Cleveland’s permitting system is genuinely complex. Some projects require review from up to 16 different departments. Historically, that meant paper plans moving from floor to floor, delays that were difficult to explain, and a process that left residents and businesses in the dark.
Under Mayor Justin Bibb’s Cleveland ERA agenda, focused on becoming more business-friendly, improving customer experience, and modernizing city operations, Cleveland set out to change that. What Kimberly and Sally have built is a model for what modern, accountable government service delivery looks like.
The Problem with Paper
Before modernization, Cleveland’s permitting process struggled under the weight of its own complexity. Large rolls of paper plans came in and were physically transferred between departments for review, and occasionally lost in the process. Applicants had no way to track where their project stood in real time. When they called for an update, staff often couldn’t give them a clear answer either.
The 80/20 reality made it especially frustrating. About 80% of permits were issued within a day or two. But for the 20% of complex projects requiring multiple reviewing bodies, the experience was “very confusing,” as Sally puts it. People didn’t know who was waiting on who, and that ambiguity created friction at every stage.
16 Departments, One Conversation
The electronic plan room has been the single biggest shift for Cleveland’s most complex projects.
Previously, each reviewing department would examine plans separately and return separate sets of comments to the applicant, creating confusion about what was actually required. Now, all departments can review plans simultaneously, mark them up in real time, and compile a single unified set of comments for the applicant.
The result is what Sally describes as “neat and tidy”, a sea change from what came before. Every department puts their stamp on the review they’ve completed. Comments are collated automatically and delivered back to the customer as one coherent response. No contradictions, no confusion about whose note takes precedence.
For a city managing nearly $2 billion in annual construction, that kind of coordination is essential.
Visibility in Accounting
Perhaps the most transformative change isn’t the electronic plan room itself, it’s what the data coming out of it enables.
Cleveland’s team now reviews KPI dashboards daily, pulling live data from Accela to see exactly where every project stands, which departments have outstanding reviews, and where backlogs are building. That visibility has changed how the city manages its operations in two important ways.
First, it creates accountability on all sides. When an applicant’s design professional claims the city is holding things up, the dashboard shows the truth, whether the delay is internal or the ball is actually in the applicant’s court.
Second, it gives leadership the data to make proactive decisions. When the team noticed a growing queue last week, they authorized weekend overtime. Staff cleared the entire backlog before Monday. Without real-time visibility, that call doesn’t get made in time.
Data That Makes the Budget Argument
For government teams operating under tight resource constraints, one of the most valuable uses of operational data is making the case for investment.
Cleveland uses its Accela-powered dashboards to do exactly that. When a department consistently shows a backlog, the data becomes the argument for additional capacity. Not “it feels like we need more people,” but a clear, time-stamped record of exactly how long work has been sitting in a queue and what the downstream impact has been.
The shift from intuition-based to evidence-based resourcing is one of the quieter but most important outcomes of Cleveland’s modernization effort.
Making Easy Things Easy
Building a system capable of managing the most complex permitting projects is only part of the equation. Cleveland is equally focused on making sure simple permits don’t get harder in the process.
Mayor Bibb raises it consistently: easy things need to stay easy. The goal is for a resident to apply from home, skip the trip to city hall, and print their permit without ever leaving their living room. Cleveland has built toward that vision with online applications, real-time customer feedback tools, and in-lobby waiting indicators for residents who prefer same-day pickup.
A dedicated customer experience manager monitors feedback, submitted via QR code, portal, and direct link, and works with Accela to course-correct in real time when friction surfaces. In one case, portal confusion was identified and resolved the same day it was reported.
What Partnership Looks Like
Cleveland’s success wasn’t just a technology implementation. It was a deliberate partnership between the city’s IT organization and its Building and Housing department, two teams that had to align on process before they could align on technology.
Kimberly describes Accela as sitting at the table throughout the process mapping work: not just delivering a product, but helping shape what the future state should look like and configuring the platform to match how Cleveland operates.
That investment in alignment including thousands of hours between IT, Building and Housing, and Accela is what made the transformation stick.
5 Key Lessons from Cleveland
- Hire for the experience, not just the technology. Cleveland brought on a dedicated customer experience manager as part of its modernization effort, someone whose entire role is monitoring feedback and closing the loop between resident experience and system performance. That role has been central to the effort’s success.
- Visibility is a service, not just a metric. When residents, applicants, and leadership can all see where a project stands in real time, accountability follows naturally. The question of “who’s waiting on who” stops being a political one and starts being an answered one.
- Data makes the budget argument. Operational dashboards don’t just improve day-to-day management, they create the evidentiary record needed to justify staffing and investment decisions. Gut feelings don’t move budget conversations. Data does.
- IT and business units have to build this together. Cleveland’s results came from a tight partnership between Information Technology and Building and Housing, not a technology deployment handed off to one team. Alignment on process had to come before alignment on platform.
- The first phase is visibility. The second is simplification. Cleveland’s near-term focus is using what they can now see to eliminate steps that aren’t necessary, reducing the number of boards and commission reviews, streamlining the departments involved, and making the process faster for everyone. You can’t simplify what you can’t see.
Looking Ahead
Cleveland is just getting started. With full visibility now established, the city is turning its attention to what comes next: using the data to eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce the number of reviewing bodies where appropriate, and make complex projects meaningfully faster, not just more transparent.
On the resident-facing side, the team continues to invest in the experience of simple permits. The ambition is straightforward: applying for a permit should be as easy as ordering something online. No trips downtown. No confusion. Just a clear, fast, digital experience that respects the resident’s time.
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Explore More
Dive deeper into Cleveland’s transformation journey and read the full transcript below.
Noam Reininger
Welcome to the Civic Innovators podcast. This is where we talk to leaders that are transforming how government services are delivered and really focusing on continuously improving constituent experiences. I’m Noam Reininger, the CEO of Accela.
Joe Morris
And I’m Joe Morris, Chief Innovation Officer at E! Republic. Today we’re headed to Cleveland, Ohio, where the city’s modernization agenda is being shaped by the Mayor Justin Bibb’s vision for what’s called the Cleveland ERA, becoming more business friendly, improving customer service and experience, and modernizing the city’s operations to move at the speed of business.
Noam Reininger
Today we’re joined by two fantastic leaders from the city — Kimberly Roy Wilson, who is the director of information technology, and Sally Martin O’Toole, who’s the director of building and housing.
Joe Morris
You’re going to hear that Cleveland’s permitting and plan review process is actually quite complex. Some projects require review from up to 16 different departments. Historically very paper-based and siloed systems were creating delays, confusion, and a lot of what’s called city hall crawls for customers just trying to understand where their permit stood.
Noam Reininger
So Cleveland’s been undergoing a radical modernization effort of putting permitting and plan review into the cloud, really focusing on the citizen constituent resident experiences. They’ve also rolled out a citywide digital plan review solution as well, and included the delivery of KPI data and dashboards that’s helping them identify bottlenecks as well as improve staffing. All while meeting constituent expectations, exceeding them, driving a tremendous amount of accountability and transparency. So the big question for us today is how can the city undergo a tremendous modernization effort like this while maintaining the highest standards for accountability, transparency, and really focusing on constituent experiences? So let’s focus on your story, this big modernization effort that you’re undergoing. And there’s a couple of things that we heard in the new Cleveland era. One is moving at the speed of business and really focusing on the customer experience and a statement of meeting customers where they are. So what does that statement mean for you all and how did you approach this transformation?
Kimberly Roy Wilson
So I think I’ll take that one first. Meeting customers where they are and moving at the speed of business. From a modernization perspective, it’s about taking our legacy data, our legacy systems and upgrading them. And so one of the first areas we wanted to start with regard to our cloud first environment is moving Accela from on-prem to the cloud. And so in doing that, there’s two things that we get on the back end of this. We get the ability to be secure in an environment that’s way more secure than the city could possibly provide the security, as well as we are in the position to be able to transform with the business by way of the updates and enhanced features as they become available on the cloud as we move forward, as opposed to being on-prem. Now meeting customers where they are, it’s more about ensuring that we create an environment for the customers to be able to navigate through our technology systems easier, faster, so they can do exactly what they want to do when it comes to obtaining a permit or a license. And so our goal here from a technology perspective is always to be able to create a platform that allows the navigation to be very simple, very navigable, very user friendly, and on the back end is also to allow the back end office to be able to process all that information in a timely manner and allow the departments and the end users to be able to be transparent with what they’re doing and what’s happening.
Joe Morris
So before we get into all the amazing things that you did on the modernization front, it’d be neat to have you walk us through kind of what that reality was for your customers and your staff and how you got to addressing it. At the beginning of the podcast, we talked about paper, we talked about the 16 departments, we talked about maybe some of that confusion and chaos and maybe the lack of visibility. What problems ultimately brought you to being where you are today?
Sally Martin O’Toole
Yes, absolutely. So construction permitting in Cleveland has had a very poor reputation, but that being said, 80% of all of our permits were issued within a day or two of someone applying for them, but it was those 20%, those complicated projects that had up to 16 reviewing bodies. People were very confused by the process. They didn’t know where things stood in real time with their project. They would call us. They would try to figure it out. They would be frustrated with the time it was taking. And sometimes we’d even lose things like plans. Paper plans would come in, huge rolls of paper plans. Those were easy to lose when they would be transferred from department to department for people to look at them. And so obviously, we wanted to find a way to put the customer’s experience first in everything we do. So one of the first steps was we hired a customer experience manager. We spent a lot of time analyzing current process to see what we wanted our future state to be. And we worked very closely with IT and they’ve been amazing, putting in thousands and thousands of hours to get to where we are today, which is a very transparent process with Accela’s help — our hand and glove partner in this work and it’s gone very well so that the customer knows in real time where the project is, how much longer it might take. It isn’t necessarily a simple process because there’s complexity to complex projects in Cleveland. We do almost $2 billion of construction permitting in a year. So it’s a lot of projects coming through and many of them are larger projects and there’s many hands in it. We now have gotten to a point where I believe we have a transparent process much easier with the electronic plan room than we had in the past with paper plans being exchanged or lost.
Noam Reininger
So Sally, I’m curious, you talked about the electronic plan room and 16 departments. And so you have an electronic plan review solution that’s integrated with Accela and part of Accela. Tell us about the why behind that and what are the results that you’re starting to see now in terms of the ability to collaborate and get multiple folks on the same page.
Sally Martin O’Toole
What’s been amazing about the electronic plan room is that with multiple reviewing bodies, they can look at the plans at the same time and mark them up at the same time. So that at the end, those comments are given to the customer as one set of comments instead of customers getting sets of comments from different departments, then it completely confuses them as to what’s wanted. So that we, at the end, compile everything. It’s very neat and tidy and it’s done in real time. So each of the departments that’s reviewed it puts their stamp on it that they’ve seen it. Those comments are collated and given back to the customer. So everyone is raving about that. It’s been a sea change for the positive.
Kimberly Roy Wilson
This is where you know moving at the speed of business and that’s really a transition from where we were. Most of what was happening was more manual, more coming to City Hall and Sally will speak to what they call the City Hall crawl and even on the back office there were silos in terms of who was doing what and who had what. So being able to have technology that enables the business to move at the speed of business actually impacts the resident or the business owner when it comes to their ability to get things done in a timely manner. And that is what modernization is about at the city of Cleveland — finding platforms such as Accela to be able to create an environment, a transformation of delivering services through our building and housing department.
Joe Morris
Let’s stick with that for a second. You talk about the speed of business, but this other theme that’s kind of come up in the conversation so far has been how visibility plays a role in achieving that speed of business. Whether that’s having that single source of truth for your residents, to your teams, but also maybe that visibility contributing to help clarify who’s waiting on who. Is the challenge on the government organization end or is it on the applicant end? So maybe you can speak to the role and the importance of visibility now in this new process.
Sally Martin O’Toole
Visibility results in accountability. And that’s what we’re seeing both with internal staff and external stakeholders. So now with the new technology, it’s very easy to see who’s waiting on who. In the past, it wasn’t so simple. And so oftentimes too, it can be the applicant. So the applicant’s design professional is telling them that they’re waiting on the city, but in truth, we’re waiting on the design professional. That’s happened many times. So it provides that level of transparency to the customer. They can say, wait, this says the city has done what they need to do. We’re waiting on a revised set of drawings. They go back to their design professional and move it forward. So I think with all of the innovation that we’ve done, what we’ve been able to do also is build Power BI dashboards that take the data from the Accela system and create — we know exactly how long something has been waiting on one of our staff. So if we know there’s a backlog in one department and we see consistently there’s a backlog in that department, it allows us to think about capacity in that department. Maybe they need another staff person. So having those metrics and proving out where we have capacity needs is also from a budgeting standpoint really, really important. And that data then proves out what we need.
Noam Reininger
Sally, I’m glad you mentioned the data and what we’ve seen a lot is that departments that are exceptional at delivering services are continuously looking at KPIs and dashboards and finding bottlenecks and challenges. And you talked about staffing as being a potential bottleneck. What other kind of bottlenecks are you looking at with the data? How are you using it operationally? Is that a regular review that’s happening to look at staffing levels? Maybe share a little bit more about how you’re using insights and KPIs.
Sally Martin O’Toole
Yeah, it’s a daily review for us. We look at it every day. We look at where everything is in the pipeline, what projects are waiting on, what departments — it’s absolutely essential for us to see that in real time so that we can course correct and address problems before it becomes a headache for the customer. And so we’ve been able to do that. Our customer experience manager pours over this data every day. And in fact, we were pouring over the data last week and we realized it’s going to be essential to do some overtime this weekend so that we can clear some of these queues. And we did, and the staff cleared the entire queue. But again, without that visibility, without seeing that in real time, hour by hour, things can get completely out of control and then very backlogged. So we’ve been able to stay on top of it this way and also make those budget arguments about why we need additional capacity in an area. And I think it’s much better to have data backing us up rather than some subjective feeling. No, we can show you why we need more people. And that’s been really helpful. And the mayor’s very determined to get this right. This is a core objective of the Cleveland ERA is to make construction permitting go faster. And we have regular check-ins with our developer community, with our commercial brokerage community to talk through what we’re doing. And I would say this is a very big year for us because now it’s very transparent. We can see everything. We can see where bottlenecks are. This is the year to try to eliminate steps that we think are not necessary to the process, make the process go much faster. So I think what we did this first go round, these 10,000 hours we all put into this was to get it to where we could see it. And now, how do we make that even better? Do we really need all these departments involved with the construction permitting process? Can we simplify it? Can we have fewer people involved? Do we need so many boards and commission reviews of projects? Can we simplify that? That’s the part we’re working on now, and that’s going to help take us much further, I think.
Joe Morris
I love the data-driven approach. And clearly not all permits are the same. You’ve got simple permits that are issued quickly, and then you’ve got also complex permits that require tremendous clarity and coordination. How are you thinking about making easy things even easier, particularly when you’re managing those complex projects? When you look around the corner, what do you see as what’s next to improve that front door experience online?
Sally Martin O’Toole
Well, we have a few things that we’re working with our Accela team on right now, especially customer waiting indicators for people who want to pick up their permit the same day. They want to wait in the lobby. They want to get the permit. You know, we built out this machine for the most complicated projects, but we want to make the easy projects better than before. And so that is a constant work in progress. We’ve got to make the easy things easy because we have a lot of complexity. We want to make it just as quick and easy to sit in your living room, order your permit, print it out and be done with it. So that will result in advantage to the customer. And we’re measuring what the customers think. So we have a portal in our department where a customer can let us know how they feel. It’s like a smiley face or a frowny face and they can choose the range. We also have it built into the system where there’s a QR code. You can go and tell us what you think. You can click a link and tell us what you think. And so we’re watching that customer feedback. We want to see if it’s going to start ticking up where we make some tweaks. And so that’s one of the roles of our customer experience managers, constantly monitoring that customer feedback and adjusting to it in real time. And our Accela partners have been great about that. So where we did find there was some confusion initially with the portal in certain areas, it was immediately course corrected on the same day.
Kimberly Roy Wilson
And just piggybacking off of what Sally said, in terms of our Accela partners, they have been sitting at the table with us as we began to map out these processes. This was a project that took — it wasn’t overnight. And honestly, as we were mapping out business processes, our Accela partners had an opportunity to modify and tailor our processes to the technology platform, which is what we were looking for. We took some time to bring in a third party to help us document what those future state processes should look like. And Accela walked us through what that is and how we could shape and create a platform that works for the city as well. Being able to have a platform that you can scale definitely will enable the city as well as the departments within the departments to grow and transform as we move forward. And that’s what, from a technology perspective, we look for. Partners are at the table, literally working with us to create alignment with their technology and processes.
Noam Reininger
Well, first of all, I want to say thank you, Kim and Sally, for spending time with us today. What’s really clear is the tremendous partnership that’s there between the information technology organization and the business building and housing side. And really, it shows the art of the possible when there’s a tremendous modernization effort, but it’s focused on business speed. It’s focused on the customer experience. What was really interesting is that you brought in a customer experience professional as part of this transformation to really focus on and then have a really tight feedback loop to continuously improve both velocity as well as the experience for constituents as they’re applying for permits. So thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Joe Morris
It also shows what’s possible when cities treat visibility as a service. Now customers see what’s happening. Staff can see where something may be stuck. And leadership from top down was much more data-driven in decision-making, and ultimately everyone wins. What a tremendous episode. Thank you for sharing your insights with us today.
Sally Martin O’Toole
Thank you.
Kimberly Roy Wilson
As Sally said, thank you. But this is the beginning, right? This is an evolution of how we are changing and modernizing our technology to enable our departments. So we’re happy to be a part of this entire journey.
Noam Reininger
So for our audience, thank you for joining the Civic Innovators podcast today. And until next time, keep asking the bold questions.
