Honolulu Permit Counter Closing Next Week To Catch Up With Backlog
More than 800 projects are waiting to clear the first hurdle in the permitting process.
Honolulu’s troubled permitting department will close its front counter services next week and won’t be accepting phone calls from the public as it tries to climb its way out of a six-week backlog of applications.
In an email to staff, Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna said the agency is experiencing a “substantial backlog” in the prescreen process, which is a first, cursory review for formatting issues. Permits can still be submitted online during the closure. But limiting customer service functions is an effort to eliminate that backlog, she wrote.
DPP declined an interview request. In an email, department spokesman Davis Pitner said the department has 830 projects in the prescreen stage, applications that started to pile up with the August introduction of new multimillion-dollar permitting software called HNL Build.
The tech switch was meant to be part of a broader effort to speed up permitting times for property owners who often have to wait months or years for the county’s blessing to build.
But it’s been a rough transition for customers and staff alike. Applicants have told Civil Beat they are frustrated that the new system asks for more information than the old one and requires the use of multiple programs to submit one application.
In a staff survey in August, employees begged for a return to the previous system, with one worker calling HNL Build a “complete failure.” Workers cited numerous issues, including failures in transferring data from the old system, information security concerns and frustration that tasks now take longer. One compared the technology switch to a bus driving toward a cliff while passengers are “screaming to no avail.”
The bumpy rollout got the attention of Honolulu City Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, who held a hearing on the matter in September. The councilman told Hawaiʻi News Now that he’d heard from community members who found the program neither user-friendly nor efficient.
In council chambers, Mayor Rick Blangiardi pushed back on the criticism at the time and said people are failing to recognize the city’s “Herculean effort” to reform the department’s shortcomings. Takeuchi Apuna, too, has defended the new system and characterized staff complaints as growing pains.
“Change is really hard,” Takeuchi Apuna said in October. “In the end, it’s meant to make everyone’s lives a lot easier. So I think there’s going to be people that complain about these things, but we understand, and we’ll do our best to make it something that works for them.”
Before HNL Build, DPP was prescreening plans in one to five days, Pitner said. It’s now a month and two weeks behind and working to get back to where it was.
“DPP staff are working overtime and also have involved a separate group from another review section within DPP to assist in reducing the prescreen backlog,” Pitner said.
The next phase of DPP’s tech upgrades will be the introduction of a program called CivCheck, which relies on artificial intelligence. That AI system is designed to guide applicants through the process and flag potential issues in the application before it is reviewed by a human. According to the published results of a pilot program launched last year, CivCheck reduced plan review time by 70%.
UPDATE: This story has been updated to make it clear that permit applications can still be filed during the weeklong permit counter shutdown.
