The Facts

A former city planner alleges that Mayor Lurie's signature PermitSF initiative reduces work for City Hall staff and used the OpenGov team to produce a research report that City Hall staff should have been asked to do.

In other words, this is not the "whistleblower" complaint he pitches to the press, but the complaints of an employee unhappy with a new system.

You can read his complaints here and judge for yourself, but here are some excerpts:

OpenGov is specifically designed in a manner that will preclude City staff from performing roles they have held for years. [...] Under the Commission's PSC Policy, the existence of a civil service class capable of performing the work means contracting out requires a compelling justification.

My second whistleblower complaint to the Controller's Office concerned the use of OpenGov staff, through the contract, to research and author a white paper on San Francisco's permitting process [...] Using contract personnel to perform this work is [...] a further displacement of civil service responsibilities

The Context

San Francisco launched PermitSF because its permit process still runs across 30 software systems. City staff told the commission that the pilot had already handled 1,500+ permits and cut Fire wait times 56%. Local 21’s formal objection makes a similar labor argument, saying the city is outsourcing work that internal staff could do.

The GrowSF Take

The existing permit tracking system, Accela, has fallen far short of its promises since it was selected in 2011. The system is expensive, slow, and complex. When GrowSF co-founder Steven Bacio was part of Google.org and embedded in the Planning Department to study its deficiencies, his team found that planners ended up using it as a time-tracking system rather than a project tracking system, and much of the work was done in offline spreadsheets and printed stacks of paper. The research project was unable to answer the question of "how many homes have been approved" because the data simply didn't exist in any useful form. At the time, public dashboards and reports were compiled by hand, not via a simple query on the Accela system.

The Accela system needs to go. It's a failure that has kept SF permitting unnecessarily complex, slow, opaque, and prone to failure. The new system may not be perfect yet, but we're only a year in, and Accela has had over 15 years to get its act together.