Even as Honolulu’s new building permitting software continues to go through growing pains, local architects are working with the county to improve it.
The Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting overhauled its permit platform in August, replacing its longstanding “POSSE” system with a new platform, HNL Build, which promised to streamline permit processing times.
This has not been popular. Users have complained of a difficult interface, quality-of-life features long available in POSSE that are no longer there, glitches and more.
But the system is improving, slowly yet surely, said Phil Camp, president of the American Institute of Architects Honolulu.
Camp told Aloha State Daily that AIA has met with DPP officials and Mayor Rick Blangiardi last month to discuss improvements to HNL Build, and hopes to have continual meetings with DPP as the system continues to evolve.
“We’d like to continue a quarterly cadence,” Camp said. “After all, architects represent the biggest percentage of permit applications from a construction valuation standpoint … we’re the ones who stamp and submit and put our licenses on the line.”
Camp said a poll of AIA member complaints about HNL Build revealed a series of common criticisms that have been passed on to DPP. Some of those, like persistent problems with starting new accounts in HNL Build, should be largely resolved by now, he said.
New account problems had dovetailed with other difficulties with data migration, Camp said. After more than two decades of use, the POSSE system had accumulated innumerable data points, histories of different permits and properties that had been available to users at a click.
This data is no longer so easily accessible, Camp said, which has slowed users’ workflows significantly. While Camp said this is partly the inevitable result of moving to any new system, he added that he spoke with DPP about the system’s historical data functionality and believes they are working on improvements.
Other concerns included a disunity between the interface used by DPP staff and users, leading to confused communications between both sides of the software.
“Where we still see an absolute issue is with jurisdictional reviews,” Camp said, explaining that large projects inevitably require reviews and approval from multiple state agencies, each with their own processes, and an ideal system would allow users to monitor a permit application’s progress through each relevant department.
Of course, Camp added, that wouldn’t necessarily mean permits would be approved faster, either. Some of those agencies — the State Historic Preservation Division, for example, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency — notoriously take a long time to approve anything, and that isn’t likely to change just because permitting software is improved.
At the same time, Camp lamented the frequency of discretionary reviews, additional reviews of aspects of a permit application that he said can become needlessly arbitrary and pedantic.
For example, he said some community development plans specify certain design features such as “warm colors” that can bog down the permitting process with debates over “how red is red.”
But this, too, would not necessarily be fixed as HNL Build improves, Camp said.
Instead, Camp said he hopes the county can follow through with a policy change endorsed by Blangiardi, who, Camp said, wants to change DPP staff’s attitudes from “why can’t it be built” to “how can it be built.”
Whether that policy change comes to pass remains to be seen. But in the meantime, Camp praised DPP Director Dawn Apuna for “jumping on this grenade.”
“It’s a really daunting task,” Camp said. “When you’re replacing a system that’s been in place for 25 years … the data alone is enormous.”
