Living and working in a city, it’s pretty easy to take some things for granted, especially our public spaces. Take Montgomery Street in downtown Syracuse, for example. One of the streets bordering City Hall, Montgomery Street sees a lot of traffic – cars meandering from Water Street to E. Washington St., city dwellers and visitors sitting at Recess Coffee’s outdoor seating, or people on foot taking a stroll through the annual Arts & Crafts Festival that sees dozens of vendors set up to showcase their work every year.
So much of city life in Syracuse and in other cities operates in what is known as the “right-of-way,” which is space that is maintained and regulated for public use. This includes city streets, road pavement, curbs, sidewalks, and often in residential areas, small grassy areas tucked between the sidewalk and the road. Regulating the public right-of-way helps to make sure infrastructure is safe and usable. It also helps to make sure that our natural resources like trees that are planted in the public right-of-way are protected.
Image Credit: City of Tucker, GA
When residents or businesses want to temporarily use or modify the right-of-way in any significant way (see examples below), they need to ask the City of Syracuse for permission to use it by applying for a “right-of-way permit.” For example, a business may apply for a right of way permit when they want to use the sidewalk to set up sidewalk café seating or install small cell 5G nodes on top of street lights or utility poles. A resident who wants to replace a section of their sidewalk would also need to apply for a right-of-way permit to do the repair.
Behind the scenes, the City’s Central Permit Office works to review right-of-way permit applications, a process that spans across more than six city departments. A few months ago, api was approached by Mediha Salkic, Director of the City of Syracuse Central Permit Office, who asked our team for assistance in improving the efficiency of the process to review and approve right-of-way permits. She also asked for our help in coming up with a way to keep track of the permits that come through her office and get passed between departments for review. Although there are dozens of types of right-of-way permits (think back to the sidewalk café and small cell 5G node examples), we’ve been asked to focus on how to improve the process of approving permits for:
Road Cuts – cutting into a city street, sidewalk, curb, or grassy area within the right-of-way.
Curb Cuts – approval of the physical location of a curb alteration (raising/lowering, widening/narrowing, adding, removing, or relocating)
Major Encroachments – making significant permanent changes to the right-of-way (removal is difficult, permanent, or requires special equipment). Examples include new roadway construction, installing new traffic signals, or installing a new sidewalk where there was no existing one, among others.
Minor Encroachments – making temporary changes to the right-of-way (can be removed with minimal effort or expense). An example of this would be a resident’s gate that swings open onto the sidewalk.
Now a couple of months into our work on the project, we’d like to share what we’ve done so far, what we’ve learned, and what’s next.
What We’ve Done
We started this project much like how we usually start projects aimed at enhancing city processes – by talking to the experts. In this case, the experts are the city staff who review and approve applications for right-of-way permits each day. They work across several different departments, including the Central Permit Office, Zoning, the Department of Public Works (DPW), Engineering, and Police.
We began by having some high-level fact-finding conversations centering around:
What’s involved in reviewing a right-of-way permit application?
How do reviewers do their work?
What works well in the process?
What doesn’t work so well?
If reviewers had a magic wand that they could use to fix any part of the process, what would they fix and why?
Since our first conversations with reviewers, we’ve had follow-up conversations to make sure what we heard was correct and to dig deeper on some perspectives and ideas that came up during our first round of conversations. We synthesized all that we learned from these conversations and thought about how we can use data, additional interviews, or other tools like process mapping, to build our understanding of what problems and opportunities are at play.
What We’ve Learned
As it is, the process for reviewing and issuing right-of-way permits works – most people involved in the process think it could work better though. Bob Moore, the City’s Right of Way Coordinator, has been referred to by his colleagues across Syracuse city government, as the “glue” that keeps the right of way process moving – among his many duties is constantly communicating with applicants, following up with reviewers, managing data and information, and aligning priorities to ensure permits get out the door in a timely manner. Still, in these early conversations with Bob and with many of the other departments involved in this complicated interdepartmental process, we’ve identified some key areas in need of improvement:
Better leveraging our software;
Streamlining communication between and within departments;
Streamlining communication and transparency with applicants while also keeping applicants accountable for submitting complete and accurate information; and
Improving consistency in workflow, documentation, and record retention.
What’s Next
Process Mapping
Conversational fact-finding is crucial in understanding how a process works and how it could use improvement, but process mapping helps us take a deep dive into each individual step of a process so we can target our solutions toward concrete changes.
Quantitative Data Analysis
Quantitative data uses numbers to help us understand how efficiently elements of a process are operating, like the average time it takes to review and approve different types of right-of-way permits. We can use quantitative data to understand how efficiently the process operates now, set goals around where we want it to be in the future, execute changes to improve the process and measure whether or not those changes helped us to reach our goals.
Gathering Applicant Perspectives
In addition to what happens behind the scenes, we also need to hear from those who actually apply for right-of-way permits. Similar to what we asked our reviewers during our initial conversations, we need to know what works, what isn’t working, and what ideas applicants have around what would make their experience in applying for a right-of-way permit better.
Phase 2: Ideation
Once we finish process mapping, quantitative data analysis, and hearing from more of our stakeholders, we will take a broad look at all we’ve learned and develop concise problem statements. Problem statements help us to be targeted about what exactly needs solving. We use these problem statements during ideation, where we generate many ideas around how to solve the problems identified. Keep an eye out for more on our right of way permitting project as we move forward!