The Southampton Village Building Department will soon have a new system online for the public to apply for building permits and other approvals.
The Village Board voted November 23 to contract with GovPilot, a provider of government management software, to build a system that will be more streamlined and organized, and easier to search.
“Our current database, Municity, is being discontinued, and I see that as an opportunity to update our database by going cloud-based,” building inspector Tien Ho So told the Village Board. He expected that the new database will be internet accessible and available to the community while providing more information.
Via Zoom, Mike Sapienza of GovPilot showed the board members a demo website to give them an idea of how the service would look on the village’s own website. Residents and builders will be able to follow links to the permit applications they are seeking, fill out forms in their web browser, attach any necessary documents, and submit everything.
“There are various PDF forms that you have on your website now,” Sapienza said. “With GovPilot, they’ll actually be able to interact with a digital form.”
Users will not have to download or print out forms.
“The difference between our forms and a PDF, or even a fillable PDF, is now, soon as they clicked on that, they are literally inside of your system with GovPilot,” he explained. “They don’t have to have a portal. They don’t need sign-ins and passwords, and they don’t even really know they’re in a system. They just kind of feel like they’re on a fillable form.”
Every keystroke is done once, he said. No Building Department staff will have to take what has been submitted by applicants and type it in someplace else. And all applications will be automatically directed to the proper person in the right department, rather than an employee having to sort through submissions and pass them along.
GovPilot can also enable the village to take online payments, which the Building Department can’t do now, Sapienza said.
In its onboarding process, GovPilot will take all of the village’s existing PDF and paper forms and create cloud-based forms, he noted. “We do all the heavy lifting in this process,” he said. “This is not a project for the village. It’s a GovPilot project.”
He said GovPilot is in 24 states so it has to be malleable. “Even though we’re born in New Jersey, with the most complicated permitting process there is, we can strip this thing down and make it really basic or beef it back up to whatever fits your guys’ needs.”
The database will also include “property profiles” for each property on the village tax rolls, including tax assessment data, ownership information and all records and permits associated with a property.
Because it is a cloud-hosted system, GovPilot does not need to install anything on village servers or devices, Sapienza noted.
He estimated that the new system could be online six to eight weeks after the village signs up. That would be sometime in January.
The cost is $7,000 one time for the build-out and $20,000 for the annual subscription. The Village Board signed up for five years.
