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Staff Report
City Council
Item No. 6.B
Meeting Date: March 13, 2024
From: Anne Ambrose, Assistant City Manager
Title: Presentation on EnerGov Implementation
City Council
RECOMMENDATION:
This item is for information and discussion only.
BACKGROUND:
To help foster development in Cathedral City, the City Council has established a five - year strategic plan goal of c reating a development process that is facilitative, predictable, and customer -focused. One of the tools necessary to achieve this goal is to have an integrated and automated enterprise, permitting and licensing (EPL) system to facilitate the various processes used by city staff and the public to include, permitting, plan review, inspections, licensing, and payments.
Staff from Planning, Building, Engineering, Public Works, Fire, IT and Finance have been in the process of implementing a product called EnerGov to perform these various functions. EnerGov is an EPL system that integrates with the City’s financial system, Munis. Staff have been working on this implementation for the past few years and had been unsuccessful in achieving a full implementation due to staffing shortages, staffing changes, leadership changes, and the challenges of not having a dedicated applications IT team member to help facilitate the change management process needed to go from paper-driven processes to fully automated online processes.
In June 2023, the City brought on Park Consulting to help refocus the efforts. Park had worked with the City of Palm Springs on their EnerGov implementation. In August, 2023, the City hired Matthew Levy as the City’s Enterprise Systems Analyst. Matthew took over management of the EnerGov implementation project. As staff further analyzed what needed to be done to fully implement the system, it was decided to shift from working with Park Consulting to working directly with Munis/EnerGov implementors. C urrently staff from the various departments are working half days weekly Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays with Matthew and the Munis/EnerGov implementors to do the hard work updating processes, determining workflows, testing and training . Staff have been diligently going through all current procedures and practices to re -engineer them to work on an on-line integrated platform with the focus
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being on customer service and making services available to the public on their timelines. Staff’s first successes include the city’s first online permits being available to, along with the ability to pay for these permits online.
DISCUSSION:
Matthew will be providing the City Council with an overview of EnerGov and where staff are at on the implementation.
To date, staff have launched online permitting for a limited number of permits with many more currently in the testing process. The permit applications currently available online are:
• Expedited HVAC Simple Changeout
• Expedited Main Service Panel Simple Changeout
• Expedited Residential Reroof
• Expedited Residential Sewer Connection
• Expedited Water Heater Simple Changeout
• Expedited Window/Door Simple Changeout
• Residential Solar PV Roof (15 KW or less)
• Residential New Pool/Spa
• Residential Pool Alteration
• Pool Drain Permit Residential/Commercial
• Garage Sale Permit
FISCAL IMPACT:
There is no fiscal impact to this report.
FIVE-YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN:
Goal D. Innovation
Objective: Cathedral City continually focuses on improving service delivery and customer experiences by successfully leveraging technology and creative initiatives to improve public services, public safety, and stimulate economic growth.
D -2 Complete and improve the installation of the Tyler EnerGov software to automate, improve and streamline the plan review, permitting and inspection processes.