City of Sammamish, WA: Streamlines Permit Operations with CentralSquare Community Development

The City of Sammamish, Washington, experienced considerable population growth following its recent annexation of Klahanie, one of the first planned communities in the Pacific Northwest. This growth and the city’s location within King County–the most populous county in the state–resulted in substantial demands for land management and community development.

The city recognized a need to improve the Permit Center’s business processes and its responsiveness to customers. It achieved this goal by replacing cumbersome, outdated landuse and building-permitting systems with CentralSquare Community Development from CentralSquare Technologies.

Before implementing CentralSquare Community Development, the city had inefficient tracking processes that very few departments utilized. It also operated with an outdated, paper-based system that had very little standardization of naming conventions, review times and file locations, which led to inconsistent responses to customers.
Darci Donovan, Permit Center Manager, stated that CentralSquare Community Development has enabled her agency to streamline reviews with consistency and deliver definitive permit review information to clients.

CentralSquare Community Development, improved efficiencies by automating permitting, managing inspections, regulating land use and tracking projects, while providing visibility status updates and allowing payment processing. “The ease of attaching documents in the CentralSquare Community Development record has been instrumental in public-record requests through the clerk’s office. We’ve gone to about 80 percent of permits now being electronic,” Donovan said.

The CentralSquare Community Development system core comprises a series of tools that are tightly linked through a GIS-centric database, providing an easy-to-use system for creating, issuing and tracking activity directly from the parcel fabric. A single-screen interface allows users to rapidly access all of the tools in the system.

“With CentralSquare Community Development, you can attach multiple parcels to a project so you can see all the parcels that will form a subdivision,” adds Donovan. “We weren’t able to give citizens accurate information in the past, which was a disservice. Just having everything in one place now has been a great benefit to our customers.”

CentralSquare Community Development also has helped Sammamish improve tracking and streamline workflow processes. Previously, only one small area of the Permit Center utilized the permit tracking system. Several departments have since bought in to the system, so CentralSquare Community Development, has helped the city improve business practices and develop better standard operating procedures overall.

“We now have easy access to complicated projects that we previously had to dig in boxes to find,” Donovan states. “CentralSquare Community Development has been a lifesaver, and the increased efficiency probably has been one of our biggest gains.”