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Morgan Hill, California
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Zucker Systems
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.