Staff Report
City Council
Item No. {{section.number}}.B
Meeting Date: October 9, 2024
From: Anne Ambrose, Assistant City Manager
Title: Presentation on EnerGov Implementation
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 creating 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, Police, Finance and IT have been in the process of implementing a product called EnerGov to perform these various functions. EnerGov is an advanced enterprise system that integrates with the city’s financial system, Tyler 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 and immediately was tasked with fixing the software roll-out. As staff further analyzed what needed to be done to implement the system, it was decided to shift from working with Park Consulting to working directly with Tyler Munis/EnerGov implementers. From August 2023 to December 2023, Matthew worked with the departments to develop a city-wide software risk analysis, upgraded the city’s software ecosystem, developed a project plan and launched a limited set of permits online In January 2024, the real project started. Staff from the various departments met in a classroom type setting every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for approximately six months straight. Each day was split into two – four hour long working sessions, for a total of 6 sessions per week. During the sessions, staff were challenged to delve deep into their current and future states by defining processes, determining workflows, fees, application requirements and also participated in testing and training operations amongst other tasks.
Once a process was defined and well documented, the work to build the process, electronically, would be done by Cindy Hansen (Finance Department) and Matthew Levy.
This process was meticulous and complex, as they had to develop a parallel system, within the system, because staff was still using the existing software.
The council was provided an update in March of 2024, to illustrate the progress staff had made. At that time, the city offered around 10 online permits and had shifted to using online invoicing capabilities. This was a great achievement at the time; however, the project had just commenced. Fast forward to the end of September 2024 and the online permit, plan and licensing portal has grown to over 130+ available applications. Each of these applications are unique and completely paperless.
The project is now in what is called “post-implementation.” This is the time where the departments have launched their available processes online, but still need ongoing support for training, software fixes/enhancements, and overall product support for residents and staff alike.
DISCUSSION:
Matthew will be providing the City Council with an overview of the EnerGov implementation and the key goals that were accomplished throughout the process.
Key goals that were accomplished:
•Over 130+ Permits, Plans and Licenses available in our online portal (Available 24/7 365)
•Integrated payment processing and invoicing
•Rapid permit and license issuance
•Business licensing new and renewal applications
•SolarApp+ integration with EPL
•City wide E-plan checking integration with EPL and Bluebeam •City wide online inspection requests
•Public facing kiosk stations with scanning ability
•Mobile inspection integration (Staff side)
•Developed a work culture based on customer service and work efficiency 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.
D-4 Improve workforce mobility and efficiency by utilizing and supporting advanced mobile devices.