Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan announces the launch of JAXEPICS on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024. The new system is designed to speed the permitting process. l Steven Ponson WJCT News 89.9
Published on January 10, 2024 at 5:55 pm
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The city of Jacksonville has launched a new website that is designed to help speed up the permitting process for businesses and residents alike.
The slow permitting process has been a common complaint that Mayor Donna Deegan has heard from small-business owners during her campaign and during her time as mayor. She said Wednesday that delays in permitting can hurt the bottom line for small-business owners and the old, slower permitting process harms the bottom line for the city too.
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“Solving bottlenecks, especially those that have such a sizable impact on our businesses, is one of the most important ways we can be fiscally responsible and good stewards of our taxpayer dollars,” Deegan said during a news conference.
The new website is called JaxEPICS, which stands for Jax Enterprise Permitting Inspections and Compliance System. It will allow users to submit and track and the city to approve the permits it receives.
The site — at JAXEPICS.coj.net — also will enable the public to look up permitting information for particular addresses.
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The mayor said the website will allow businesses and residents to upload documents to the website directly, and it will send notifications to customers and city staff once steps are completed or if additional documents are needed.
The new site also will allow employees to spend more time reviewing permits and less time doing paperwork because the documents will be digital.
Josh Gideon, interim planning director with the city, said the city’s main bottleneck in permitting was not having all the right documentation at the beginning of the process.
“One of the huge things we’re doing is trying to minimize the chance that a permit is submitted incomplete so that we can get that permit issued on that first submission,” Gideon said.
Before the new system, it typically took about 30 business days to review commercial permits, Gideon said. The goal with the new system is to get the wait time down to 20 business days.
For residential reviews, it typically took 25 to 30 business days, and the goal now is 15 business days over the coming months.
The city said the new site cost about $3.6 million to develop, less than the $9 million estimated. The mayor said the site was developed in house, saving millions in tax dollars.
The new website is not the only step the city is taking to reduce permitting waits. It now has a contract with the engineering company Bureau Veritas, which supplies plan reviewers. The city is looking to add 10 positions to its staff within the Planning and Development Department.
Gideon said four of those positions will be in the development services division and the six others in the building inspection division.
The positions still need approval from the Jacksonville City Council.
