One-stop permits should save city money, customers time

FORT COLLINS – A process called budgeting for outcomes has brought changes to Fort Collins that planning and building officials expect will save money and improve customer service.

It’s too soon to tell how much of a difference the city of Fort Collins’ new One Stop Customer Service Center for Planning and Building Services and Development Review will make for customers.

The city, meanwhile, will save about $50,000 over the first year the change is implemented, said Felix Lee, director of Building and Zoning. That’s the equivalent of one full-time employee, a position Lee said will be absorbed through attrition.

In subsequent years Lee estimates the city will save an additional $50,000, with a total reduction in staff of two full-time workers.

The change consolidates three service counters inside the city building at 281 N. College Ave. – one each for building permit services, engineering services and current planning – into one.

The counter, located just inside the Maple Street entrance to the building, remains the location for citizens to obtain building permits and inspections, contractor licensing, interior remodel and tenant-finish permits, detached-garage, deck and patio-cover permits and administrative changes. All development applications, previously submitted at the Current Planning counter near the College Avenue entrance, will also be submitted at this counter.

Before the one-stop shop, a customer seeking a building permit who was also required to submit a development plan and might also need a street-cut permit for the project would have had to write three separate checks at three different counters in the building. Now, instead of visiting separate counters and writing separate checks for each function, customers can get most needs taken care of in one stop.

“So we’re not shuffling people from one door to the next in a bureaucratic maze,” Lee said. “We’ll consolidate services, save perhaps two administrative positions and hopefully provide more direct customer service.”

Lee said the changeover is still under way. “It’s a work in progress now; it’s an evolving thing. We just started a few months ago and there is a lot of training involved to get people trained on various processes and what’s involved for intake of those processes.

“What we’re doing now is cross-training with the other departments, learning their processes so we can perform those functions at the same counter,” he added.

There’s more work to be done, even once all the training is complete. Remodeling or reconfiguration may be necessary so that visitors aren’t confused by what appear to be public counters.

Some signs indicating the change are in place, but more are in the works. “Maybe we will have some sort of kiosk in the entry area,” Lee said.

Changes still to be implemented

Fort Collins developer and contractor Russ Wells of Anchor Development said he hadn’t noticed many changes since the city began implementing the new approach at the first of the year.

Wells, who didn’t voice any complaints with the system in the first place, said the new approach won’t be that different. He recently submitted final plans for a townhome and single-family project near Taft Hill Road and Mulberry Street.

“It wasn’t that much of a change for me,” he said. “We had to pay at the building department counter and submit the plans there instead of at the current planning office.”

Lee said that during the budgeting process in 2005, his department opted to take over the consolidated services because it has the largest administrative staff in the building.

Diane Jones, deputy city manager, said that the budgeting for outcomes approach that yielded the one-stop shop in building services looks at budgeting in a different way. With flat sales- and use-tax revenues and a desire to improve the process for determining how to best use available resources, the city turned to budgeting for outcomes.

Instead of dividing up a base budget number, the new budgeting approach looks at services and programs that are linked to results that matter most in the community.

“The City Council went through and identified key results that the public really values,” Jones said. “Those were things like improving economic health, improving environmental health, improving neighborhood quality, a safer community, improving cultural, recreational and educational opportunities, improving transportation and engaging in high-performing government.”

Lee and Jones explained the process looked at “offers,” essentially groups of services and programs that could achieve those results. “Out of that then grew a variety of concepts, one of which was the one-stop shop.”

Lee said the new one-stop shop will likely be fully operational by the middle of the year.

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