SimpliGov |
October 28, 2026
Permits stall when routing runs on email. See the daily failures building officials face, and how permit tracking software shows where each permit stands.
In this article
A building permit application usually needs sign-off from zoning, plan review, fire and engineering before it can be issued. In many offices, each of those handoffs still depends on someone forwarding an email at the right time. The only way to find out where an application stands is to call whoever touched it last.
For building officials, this is less a staffing problem than a visibility problem. They are accountable for turnaround times, complete reviews and statutory deadlines on work that nobody can see in one place.
Permit review crosses departments by design. In Salt Lake City, a single building permit can require approval from Building Code, Structural Code, Fire Code, Zoning, Planning, Public Utilities, Engineering, Transportation and Urban Forestry. The city runs those reviews concurrently through an electronic plan review process.
Many offices still handle the same sequence one inbox at a time. When routing between zoning, plan review, the fire marshal and final inspection depends on email or a folder passed between desks, the application stops moving whenever a reviewer is out or a message gets buried.
An applicant calls to ask where their permit is, and staff can’t answer without tracking down the last reviewer who had it. Each call takes a clerk or reviewer away from review work, and the calls keep coming because the applicant has no other way to get an answer. In practice, the volume of status calls is a fair measure of how little of the process is visible, even to the people running it.
One reviewer emails a list of corrections to the applicant, and the next reviewer never sees it. The applicant resubmits with some items still open, and another round of review begins.
Incomplete submissions add to the load. A paper or PDF form will accept an application with required fields left blank, which leaves staff spending hours calling applicants for missing documents when they should be reviewing plans.
State law puts a clock on much of this work. Florida requires a decision on building permits for structures under 7,500 square feet within 30 business days of a complete application, under section 553.792 of the Florida Statutes. Washington requires a final decision on project permits within 65 days of the completeness determination, under RCW 36.70B.080.
Meeting deadlines like these depends on knowing how long each application has been waiting, and when the work lives in individual inboxes, nobody has that information. Leadership often learns about an aging permit when a council member forwards a resident complaint or a reporter calls.
In many offices, only a few long-serving staff know which reviewers need to see a given permit type and in what order. Because those rules aren’t written down anywhere, part of the operation leaves when one of those people retires. New staff learn the routing by asking, and in the meantime applications get misrouted or stall without anyone noticing.
When backlogs grow, the usual request is for more staff. It’s an understandable one, since a backlog looks like a capacity problem. But adding reviewers to a process nobody can see tends to multiply the coordination work: more inboxes to check, more forwarded emails and more status calls to trace. Until the coordination itself is fixed, new hires inherit the bottleneck instead of relieving it.
Permit tracking software helps only when the process underneath it is structured. When it is, each application routes to the next reviewer by defined rules, and corrections attach to the permit record where every reviewer can see them. Applicants check their own status instead of calling. Aging applications surface while there is still time to act, and the routing keeps working after the people who designed it move on.
That is what permits and licensing automation looks like when the full process, from application to issuance, runs as one government workflow. SimpliGov puts the operation of government programs back in the hands of the teams responsible for delivering them.
In a building department, that starts with the people who know the routing. Staff can build the permit process themselves and change it when a rule or reviewer changes, without a development project. Applications come in through accessible digital forms that won’t submit until required fields and documents are complete, and fees can be collected in the same step. Each application then routes to zoning, plan review, fire and engineering by the department’s own rules, including conditional steps that apply only to certain permit types. Approvals are signed inside the workflow instead of over email, and a live dashboard shows processing times at each stage, so supervisors can see where permits are waiting and keep an audit trail of every decision.
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