Development Services Review. Final Report. Zucker July 2016

against standard review Performance Standards to determine whether Standards are being met and often. The data also allows them to ensure that enough staff are available to accommodate service demands, which is particularly important in communities, such as this, that offer the service to any project (e.g., as opposed to some communities that only offer the service to applicants with key economic development projects). The City has not established performance standards for expedited review services or standard review services and data was not available to show that expedited reviews consistently occur more rapidly than standard reviews. Staff indicated that the utilization of contract planners increases the processing capacity of the Division and ensures that expedited projects are processed and managed quicker that they could be by regular full time staff. While we agree that the utilization of contract planners does expand available staffing resources, we are not convinced that applicants paying for expedited services are consistently receiving more rapid development review processing, since data is not available to demonstrate such. For example, we heard from staff and focus groups that engineering reviews are chronically late. 119. Recommendation: The Community Development Director should establish Performance Standards for expedited review, which should be included in the TRAKiT system and tracked, monitored and reported, weekly.

See the “Performance Standards” heading for recommended Performance Standards.

GIS System

Staff reported that the GIS system needs to be further enhanced and updated so that it offers a reliable, accurate and robust tool for the Division and other City functions. Staff noted that a GIS operations plan has not been established so there has been inconsistent effort expended to update and manage data layers (e.g., addresses), so data is not reliable. In an effort to make the system more robust and accessible to Planners and other internal users, one of the Planners voluntarily added data layers and created a web based mapping system, titled “MH Maps,” and we applaud the Planner’s efforts in this regard. However, maintaining this this voluntary work effort has proven to be challenging since it competes with more pressing work priorities. As such, the system has not been fully updated in nearly 5 years.

Morgan Hill, California

115

Zucker Systems