Trending
Utility permitting in Cape Coral may get a tad more expensive but city officials say if you pay more, it's going to be on you.
Cape Coral City Council said Wednesday they would like to look further at a proposed administration fee for utilities permitting resubmissions.
The presentation resulted in one proposal that needs council direction -- to add language to implement an administrative fee for each resubmission after the first of $20.
Councilmember Laurie Lehmann said if the contractor is "screwing up on an application, we need to examine what the actual cost is."
"Let's face it, it's a pain when you have to go through multiple reviews because of a contractor error. I think it needs to be covered," she said.
City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn said the permitting is for a property that currently does not have water or sewer as the city expands to utility service area.
"It is a service that the water and sewer fund is providing customers. We want to make sure you get connected -- abandon the septic and connect appropriately," he said. "We are providing a service to our future customers."
Ilczyszyn said some of the issues for resubmission is leaving out the owl affidavit, or a typo in the STRAP number. He said they are getting rid of the ability to make those areas cause a delay in time.
"We also need to make sure the system doesn't allow unnecessary waste. Since we have made the system fool proof it doesn't make sense for water and sewer ratepayers to subsidize. We need to make sure our system is tight. Now if they make a mistake, it is a bona fide issue on their end," Ilczyszyn said.
He said the $20 may not be a full cost recovery fee.
"We would have to come to council to make that implementable fee. We can look at the actual cost," Ilczyszyn said.
The utilities permitting Kaizen presentation began with Team Lead Myri Del Leon sharing that the scope of the work was weeks of dedicated effort committed to make service faster, more accurate and consistent for residents and contractors.
The event scope was to reduce the overall utility connection processing time by 25%, improve permit completion and closeout time by 25%, create a system to expose process stops to sustain and improve, create standard work and train office workers on the new processes and create a sustainment system to answer -- are we improving.
The first issue was to improve documentation accuracy, as there is no penalty for making errors, as well as submitting incomplete or incorrect affidavits.
The solution is to eliminate the separate paper Wildlife Affidavit by incorporating it directly into the online permit applications, which will prevent common issues such as incorrect addresses, STRAP errors, and unsigned affidavits.
A minor change was converting all user entries entered to capital letters, which reduces the need for staff to manually change for standardization.
In order to address the issues with not having the correct STRAP number, or not submitting it at all, it is now required before an application is submitted.
Within the next two weeks, ITS will implement STRAP validation in the online applications within the next two weeks to ensure they are valid.
Avoidable delays were also addressed with the solution of consolidating two permit types -- utility connection and septic abandonment -- into one combined permit.
In addition, it is now required that permit fees -- meter installation fee and septic abandonment fee -- be paid before the permit is reviewed. There is also an automatic calculation of fees based on the applicant's selections.
The review steps are now standardized to provide real time information for employees in one dashboard in two hub cards, so staff no longer has to research, which increased the review time.
"These are the kind of changes that make changeable impacts," Councilmember Keith Long said.