Show Notes
In this episode of Civic Innovators, we sit down with Nicole Ubbink, Assistant Director of Community and Economic Development for Merced County, California, to explore how the county achieved a 72% improvement in permits processed within just 90 days of launching a new digital platform.
Merced County recently unified its entire permitting and land management operations—moving to 100% online submittals and payments, streamlining internal workflows, and breaking down departmental silos that had existed for years. This transformation didn’t just modernize operations—it reshaped how staff work, how citizens engage, and how departments collaborate.
Learn more at accela.com/podcast.
More from Civic Innovators
Longmont is one of Colorado's most recognized civic innovators - its community-owned NextLight fiber network made it the state's first gigabit city. That same forward-leaning culture shows up inside Development Services, where Adrian Lewis has spent nine years as the full end-to-end owner of the city's Accela platform, building the back end, the front end, and the workflows for every department.This episode follows Longmont's evolution from a mature permitting operation into a testbed for what's next: citizen self-service through OpenCounter, digital plan review with ePermitHub, and an early pilot of AI-assisted plan review. Running through it all is a challenge every agency is facing - the "Silver Tsunami" of retiring expertise - and the question of how you capture institutional knowledge and build systems that outlast any one person. It's also a funding story: Longmont paid for both OpenCounter and ePermitHub with grant dollars, and Longmont can walk through how they found those grants and made the case internally.Learn more at accela.com/podcast.
In this milestone episode, Civic Innovators welcomes a new co-host: Rob Lloyd, Director of the Center for Digital Government and former CTO of Seattle and San Jose. With over 30 years of civic technology leadership, Rob brings a rare dual perspective, having built transformation initiatives from inside city government and now advising municipalities nationwide.
How does a city turn raw permitting data into real operational insight?
What does it take to go fully paperless overnight? In 2017, Mesa, Arizona eliminated paper from permitting, planning, and licensing entirely. No phased rollout. No fallback. Just a full commitment to digital transformation. In this episode, Heather Bassford, Development Services, and Samuel Small, Senior Software Engineer, from the City of Mesa join Accela CEO Noam Reininger and eRepublic's Joe Morris to share how they pulled it off, and what they'd tell every other city still on the fence. What you'll hear: How Mesa built trust with contractors, developers, and mom-and-pop applicants How they cut right-of-way permit processing from 15 minutes to 15 seconds Why low-code tools let their team respond to new regulations in days How data democratization changed the way leadership makes decisions If your city is weighing a big digital move and wondering how to manage the change, this episode is for you. Learn more at accela.com.
What does it take to modernize one of America's most complex permitting systems and make it work for residents?In this episode of Civic Innovators, we visit Cleveland, Ohio, where Mayor Justin Bibb's Cleveland Era agenda is transforming how the city delivers services. With nearly $2 billion in annual construction permitting and projects requiring review from up to 16 departments, Cleveland faced a real challenge: too much paper, too little visibility, and a process that left residents and businesses in the dark.Kimberly Roy Wilson, Director of Information Technology, and Sally Martin O'Toole, Director of Building and Housing, share how Cleveland moved its permitting and plan review to the cloud, deployed a citywide electronic plan room, and built real-time KPI dashboards that drive daily decisions, from clearing backlogs to making the case for additional staff capacity.The result? A transparent, data-driven process that holds both government and applicants accountable and keeps Cleveland moving at the speed of business.Learn more at accela.com/podcast.