San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie will commit to releasing weekly reports on how the tech firm OpenGov is overhauling the city’s embattled permitting systems — a contract it won even though city staff said it was not the best suited for the task.
PermitSF, Lurie’s initiative to tackle city permitting, was a key promise on the campaign trail. It launched earlier this year, with the goal of streamlining and centralizing permitting so that all city permits can be obtained through a single web portal.
The decision to release the weekly progress reports comes a month after media reports revealed that the mayor’s office went outside normal procedure to award the $5.9 million contract to build the new permitting system to OpenGov. The company’s costs were far higher than competitors, and it scored poorly with a panel of city staffers.
Want the latest on the Mission and San Francisco? Sign up for our free daily newsletter below.Sign up
The company’s leadership also has ties to Lurie including past donations to his campaign and his former nonprofit. The deal prompted Supervisor Jackie Fielder to call for a hearing to investigate the process.
Ned Segal, the mayor’s policy chief for housing and economic development, “unilaterally” overruled a staff recommendation in awarding the contract to OpenGov, according to the San Francisco Standard.
The weekly updates will serve as “something public, so people can read it themselves without our explanation or yours, and it’s just out there in the open for people,” Segal said in an interview Tuesday. He hoped that the updates would bring some “transparency benefit” to the project, Segal added.
The documents, the mayor’s office said, will be shared whether they report good progress, bad progress or no progress.
The first three weekly status reports, written by OpenGov’s project manager, Angelica Au, were sent on Oct. 31, Nov. 7 and Nov. 14. The latest memo indicates that the goal of rolling out fire permits, building permits and events permits by February is realistic.
Earlier this year, many in the city felt that goal was aggressive at best, and unrealistic at worst.
Between late October and mid-November, the project health of PermitSF moved from a red status, indicating the presence of major issues, to a stable yellow status, indicating only potential risks to project delivery.
Meanwhile, over the three weeks, some due dates have been postponed by several days to several weeks, including one that has been pushed back by as long as four weeks.
The weekly updates also identified small potential barriers to meeting the February deadline including the day off for Veterans Day.
“What we’re looking for is to see that, each week, you are making progress, that you’re having new challenges come up,” said Segal in the interview, whether it’s about collaboration between departments, or how to tie two software systems together.
In an interview today, Florence Simon, director of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, added that meeting the February deadline to roll out a subset of permits is “a big deal.”
“The last time somebody tried to do this, which was Accela before Ned and I got here, it was like an eight-year project that cost $12 million and no permits,” she said.
Lurie has steadfastly stood by the controversial contract in the past month, and Segal spoke highly of the collaboration with OpenGov.
“OpenGov have been great partners because they’ve done this implementation many times, they are able to look around corners and help us understand what challenge might come next,” he said.
The 13-year-old firm says that it has worked with more than 2,000 governments across the country. It is unclear, however, whether it has worked with any clients similar to the size and complexity of San Francisco.
The two references OpenGov listed in its response to the PermitSF Request For Information were Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The former has a population of about 121,000 and the latter has a population of around 191,000, though the city’s request for information required references from public sector clients that can speak to the vendor’s experience with cities “at a similar scale to San Francisco.”
Regarding the upcoming hearing called for by Supervisor Fielder, Segal said, “We’re just going to keep plugging away on the implementation.”
Keep Mission Local free—match your gift today!
We have a big year-end goal: $300,000 by Dec. 31. Thanks to generous donors, every dollar donated up to $76,500 will be doubled!
It’s more important than ever that everyone has access to news that reports, explains and keeps them informed. Paywalls don’t serve anyone.
Your support makes it possible for Mission Local’s content to be forever free — for everyone.
about:blank
Latest News
Supervisor Connie Chan announces run for Congress
S.F. anti-graffiti workers paint over the Valencia Art Wall
DoorDash wants to test drones in the Mission. Teamsters are pushing back.
Yujie Zhou
I’m reporting from Bayview-Hunters Point and Chinatown. I came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and became a full-time staff reporter as part of the Report for America and have stayed on. Before falling in love with the Mission, I covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. I’m proud to be a bilingual journalist. Follow me on Twitter @Yujie_ZZ.More by Yujie Zhou
Io Yeh Gilman
REPORTER. Io is a staff reporter covering city hall as a part of Report for America, which supports journalists in local newsrooms. She was born and raised in San Francisco and previously reported on the city while working for her high school newspaper, The Lowell. Io studied the history of science at Harvard and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.More by Io Yeh Gilman
