How Cleveland Is Turning Visibility Into Accountability Across $2 Billion in Annual Construction Permitting

At a Glance 

Cleveland processes nearly $2 billion in construction permits every year. For a long time, that meant paper plan sets transferred between departments, limited real-time visibility, and a frustrating experience locals called the “city hall crawl”, contractors and developers making repeated trips downtown just to find out where their project stood. 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 fundamentally change that.  

The Challenge 

Cleveland’s permitting process is genuinely complex. Some projects require review from up to 16 different departments. Historically, that complexity played out across paper: large rolls of plans physically moving from floor to floor, department to department, with no unified system for tracking where things stood. 

The result was chronic confusion for applicants. When residents or developers called to check on a project, staff often couldn’t provide a clear, real-time answer. Paper plans were occasionally lost in transit. And because each reviewing department worked in isolation, applicants received separate, sometimes conflicting sets of comments, with no clear guidance on whose feedback took precedence. 

The city’s 80/20 reality made the stakes clear. About 80% of permits were issued within a day or two. But for the 20% of complex projects involving multiple reviewing bodies, the experience was deeply frustrating for everyone involved: applicants, staff, and leadership alike. Siloed back-office systems meant no one had a complete picture of the pipeline, and the absence of data made it nearly impossible to identify bottlenecks or make the case for additional resources. 

As Mayor Bibb launched the Cleveland Era with a commitment to modernize city operations and move at the speed of business, it became clear that an opaque, paper-based permitting process was incompatible with that vision.  

The Solution 

Cleveland partnered with Accela to move its permitting and plan review operations to the cloud, replacing paper-based workflows with a modern, integrated digital platform. The initiative touched every dimension of the permitting experience, from the front door residents use to apply, to the back-office workflows staff rely on to process and review applications. 

A city-wide electronic plan review solution was deployed alongside the Accela Civic Platform, enabling multiple reviewing departments to access, mark up, and comment on the same set of plans simultaneously. Instead of plans moving serially from department to department, applicants receive comments from all reviewing bodies, which are now collated into a single, unified response delivered directly to the applicant. 

Power BI dashboards, fed by live data from Accela, give Cleveland’s team real-time visibility into every project in the pipeline. The city’s customer experience manager reviews this data daily, monitoring queue depths, identifying backlogs before they become crises, and tracking customer satisfaction feedback submitted via QR code, portal, and direct link. 

The transformation was a true partnership. Accela’s team worked alongside Cleveland’s IT and Building and Housing departments through the full process-mapping effort, helping shape future-state workflows before configuring the platform to match how the city operates. A dedicated customer experience manager was also hired as part of the initiative, a role that has become central to the city’s continuous improvement approach. 

The Benefits 

Cleveland’s shift to a unified digital platform has delivered measurable improvements across every layer of the permitting process: 

• Coordinated, concurrent plan review:  All reviewing departments access the same plans simultaneously, mark them up in real time, and deliver a single unified set of comments to the applicant. No more fragmented feedback, no more conflicting guidance. 

• Real-time customer visibility:  Applicants can now track exactly where their project stands at any point in the process, including whether a delay is on the city’s end or theirs. 

• Daily data-driven operations:  Power BI dashboards pull live data from Accela and are reviewed daily, giving leadership the ability to course-correct before issues escalate. When a growing queue was identified, the team authorized weekend overtime and staff cleared the entire backlog. 

• Evidence-based resource planning:  Operational dashboards don’t just improve day-to-day management, they create the evidentiary record needed to justify staffing and investment decisions. The shift from “it feels like we need more people” to “here’s exactly what the data shows” has changed the city’s budget conversations. 

• A better front-door experience:  Residents can now apply for simple permits from home, skipping the trip to city hall entirely. Customer feedback is continuously monitored and acted on in real time. In one case, portal confusion was identified and resolved the same day it was reported. 

• Continuous improvement built in:  A dedicated customer experience manager monitors satisfaction metrics, closes feedback loops, and works directly with the Accela team to make adjustments when friction surfaces. 

The Results 

Cleveland’s modernization is still in its early stages, but the foundation it has built is already delivering results and enabling the next phase of improvement. 

With full pipeline visibility now established, the city’s focus has shifted to using what it can see to make the process faster. That means evaluating which steps are truly necessary, reducing the number of reviewing departments where appropriate, and streamlining board and commission reviews that add time without adding value. The 10,000 hours invested to get here weren’t just about building a system; they were about creating the visibility needed to make the right improvements. 

On the resident-facing side, the city is actively working to make simple permits as frictionless as possible. The goal: apply from home, print the permit, and be done: no trips downtown, no confusion, no unnecessary steps.

Cleveland is proving that modernizing government services isn’t just about speed. It’s about creating the visibility and accountability structures that allow a city to continuously improve, and to make that improvement visible to the residents and businesses it serves.  

Interested in learning more? 

To learn more about how the Accela Civic Platform can help your agency build transparency, drive accountability, and deliver better experiences for residents and businesses, book a demo today.

BOOK DEMO