MALIBU—On May 14, the city of Malibu indicated in an email to Canyon News that it launched a new online Development Portal that streamlines the permitting process as part of the city’s comprehensive effort to improve customer service at Malibu City Hall. The Portal is available at https://MalibuCity.org/DevelopmentPortal.
“Employing technology to help Malibu improve the efficiency of its day to day operations is one of our major objectives and this Portal is a significant step in that direction,” said Mayor Steve Uhring. “Our new Portal empowers our community to navigate development projects with ease and transparency. It simplifies the submittal of documents to various City Departments and in return provides a series of dashboards that allow the user to monitor the progress of their project.”
The new Portal dashboard is intended to mirror the existing flow of home and building construction, repair, renovation, and other projects as they move through Malibu’s development phases. It starts with a project, moves into Planning, followed by Building Safety, Permits, and finally into Inspections, making it easy and transparent for the property owner to follow the progress of their project. Users can see their project-related public documents.
The Development Portal was developed for property owners and building professionals to monitor and track their applications through the permitting process. The Portal is accessible on the city’s homepage. After clicking one of the links on the homepage, users are taken to the Portal dashboard where they can create an account and access project information and numerous other services. To further expand the user experience, many of the services offered in the Portal, such as requesting an inspection, reviewing records, and requesting to initial a new application, do not require users to register.
Users can keep track of all projects, monitor progress, revisions, corrections, pending fees, upload application materials, and submissions for each project. City staff can request required documents and accept or decline them instantly. The document submission upload technology is easy to use.
Submittal features have been re-designed to further streamline the process, making it less time consuming and requiring less information to initiate a new application or to result in response to corrections. Each new application request is reviewed by a senior staff member to ensure that the correct application type is assigned to a proposed project.
To ensure that residents and building professionals are comfortable with the new Portal, staff is actively holding individual tutorials for owners and building professionals. To request a tutorial, contact Patricia Salazar, Development and Operations Manager, at psalazar@malibucity.org or Tracey Rossine, Environmental Programs Manager, at trossine@malibucity.org.
Over 135 users have registered to monitor projects, staff have requested more than 900 documents using the Portal, and 500 documents have been uploaded by building professionals or residents.
For an overview of the Portal, see the PowerPoint presentation at https://MalibuCity.org/PortalPPT.
For detailed instructions on how to use the Portal, including a video tutorial, visit: https://malibucity.org/858/Development-Portal.
By Trevor