On behalf of the National Alliance, NCSBCS Executive Director, Robert Wible, thanked the Milpitas Assistant City Manager, Blair King, and Chief Building Official, Edgar Rodriguez, for hosting the second meeting of the Alliance’s Planning and Coordinating Task Force.

Attendees briefly introduced themselves. In attendance were:

Susan Arpan, City of Palo Alto, California
Jean Boulin, U. S. Department of Energy (participated by telephone)
Deepak Gandhi, Porteum, Inc.
Fred Herman, City of Palo Alto, California
Blair King, City of Milpitas, California
Bob Kraiss, ADAPTEC, Inc.
Thomas Lighthouse, VTM Corporation
Terry Medina, City of Milpitas, California
Ron Ranconi, CAS Architects (AIA)
Edgar Rodriguez, City of Milpitas, California
Amal Sinha, City of San Jose, California, & AMCBO
Thomas Weekes, NCSBCS & Underwriters Laboratories
Bill Weisegerber, City of Milpitas
Robert Wible, NCSBCS

It was noted that several other Task Force members were scheduled to join the meeting by phone during the morning. Mr. Wible also noted he had received regrets from several task force members who were unable to attend but who were committed to serving on the work groups that would emerge out of this session.

Mr. Wible briefly reviewed the purpose of the day’s meeting and the origins of the National Alliance. A copy of the Alliance’s update report (Attachment A) and the minutes of the Task Forces March 28, 2002, meeting (Attachment B) were distributed. Mr. Wible indicated the objective of this meeting was to review lessons learned from regulatory streamlining using information technology in Silicon Valley and set the timetable and identify Task Force members to work on the group’s work products for 2003.

He then turned the program over to Messrs. King and Rodriguez for their welcoming remarks.

Deputy City Manager King expressed his city’s pleasure in hosting the National Alliance meeting and described the state-of-the art high tech city hall and the private-public sector effort that had come together in the city to build it and to support regulatory streamlining through the use of information technology. Following lunch there will be a tour of new city hall and the building department and a demonstration of the high tech features of the facility. The Deputy City Manager noted that Milpitas was privileged to be the corporate headquarters for two Fortune 500 firms and that 12 other Fortune 500 companies had offices within the city. (Milpitas has a population of 62,000 and over 100,000 South Bay area citizens are employed within its boundaries.)

City Fire Chief, Bill Weisegerber, and Technology Director, Terry Medina, also offered some welcoming remarks.

The NCSBCS Executive Director thanked the city again for hosting the meeting and went on to describe the Planning and Coordinating Task Force’s five work products for 2003. He indicated that at the end of the meeting, he would be seeking volunteers from the attendees to join other Task Force members who could not be present to serve on one or more of five work groups.

Permit Streamlining and Codes Uniformity in Silicon Valley – Bob Kraiss, Director of Corporate Facilities at Adaptec, Inc., traced the origins and the accomplishments of the Joint Venture Partnership in Silicon Valley during the 1990’s. He indicated the objective of that effort was to help retain the region’s industry by making the building regulatory system more effective and efficient. This originated with cooperative efforts between the public and private sector within the South Bay area to reduce the regulatory cost of construction through process analysis and the application of information technology to restructured building code enforcement departments within 34 local jurisdictions.

He said that process began in 1993 with a series of meetings in which the construction industry and local governments looked at reasons why they were not working well together. It progressed through both the public and private sectors sharing their best practices towards how to solve each party’s three biggest problems. Mr. Kraiss then traced lessons learned from that effort and shared copies of several streamlining project reports produced by the Joint Venture. (The following reports will be available via the National Alliance portion of the NCSBCS website (www.ncsbcs.org) - Fires, Floods, and Faults – Silicon Valley’s Best Prepare for the Worst; Permit Streamlining Best Practices II – Strategies for Success; Permit Streamlining Best Practices III – Examples of Excellence; and Permit Streamlining Pathways to Progress.)

Palo Alto Chief Building Official, Fred Herman; San Jose Chief Building Official, Amal Sinha; and host Edgar Rodriguez, also participated in the Joint Venture streamlining project, shared their views on the progress that had been made over the years. This included the reduction in the number of local amendments within the 34 South Bay jurisdictions from 411 down to 3.

(Several other jurisdictions in Silicon Valley are providing the Alliance with copies of enabling legislation and model regulations that were put in place to facilitate regulatory streamlining and the use of information technology.)

City of San Jose Special Incentive Program for Tenant Improvements of Industrial, Research and Development Facilities – One of the current major problems facing Silicon Valley is the amount of empty office and research facility space that has arisen during the nation’s recent economic downturn. Amal Sinha, San Jose Chief Building Official, provided a Powerpoint presentation (Attachment C) describing the innovative program that his jurisdiction recently launched to address that issue. Facilitated by online permitting and IVR field inspections and pre-permit counseling sessions, the City of San Jose has pioneered a pay-later fast track permitting and inspection system to get new tenants into vacant office building space within the city. The system compresses the existing permitting and inspection process from several weeks to 3 days and has helped to reduce the vacancy rate within their jurisdiction.

Creating Partnerships to Attain Goals – The Business Case for Regulatory Streamlining and Practical Guide for Obtaining It. Edgar Rodriguez, Bob Kraiss, Ron Ranconi, and Thomas Lighthouse each took turns describing various aspects of the initiative undertaken in Milpitas, California, to establish a private-public partnership to streamline that city’s building regulatory process making maximum use of information technology. In their presentation they described: the steps that were taken to bring together industry and government officials to candidly identify and then develop an action agenda to streamline building regulatory services; the business case for regulatory streamlining; the actual streamlining initiatives that were adopted; and actions being taken to keep the cooperative public-private sector partnership moving forward.

Among the immediate benefits of the above streamlining initiative are: the fact that 75% of all plan checks in the city are now handled as Express Services, taking an average of between 15 minutes and one hour as opposed to 3 to 10 days prior to regulatory streamlining; and that a number of clients within the jurisdiction were taking advantage of the new "after hours inspection services" and "courtesy inspections" that significantly reduce costly "down time" for builders waiting for inspections to be scheduled and conducted. (It was noted that a one-day reduction in any such permitting, plans review, and inspection time saves INTEL Corporation an average of $100,000/day on their projects.)

An extensive discussion followed the above presentation. In that discussion it was noted that the speakers’ Powerpoint presentation provided a step-by-step guide to other communities across the nation that might want to consider regulatory streamlining.

NCSBCS requested and will post on the Alliance portion of their website a copy of the speakers’ Powerpoint presentation. (See Attachment D for this presentation.) NCSBCS asked if the presenters had a problem fielding calls from other jurisdictions regarding the Milpitas experience. All four of the speakers concurred that they would be pleased to field such inquiries.

Mr. Wible, on behalf of the Task Force members and guests, thanked the speakers for their presentations. Information on regulatory streamlining initiatives in several other states was discussed. A copy of the bill currently before the Oregon legislature to support uniform permitting in that state was distributed to all attendees.

(See http://pub.das.state.or.us/LEG_BILLS/PDFS/AESB713.pdf for the text of Oregon Senate Bill 713.)

The meeting then adjourned for lunch followed by a Powerpoint presentation and one-hour tour of the Milpitas City Hall including a demonstration of its advanced information technology hardware and software. This included a video-conferencing facility, automated city council chambers, electronic permitting and use of large flat screen monitors for plans review, and computerized white boards. (Terry Medina, Acting Director of the City of Milpitas IS Department, led this tour). View his Powerpoint presentation.

At 2:30 p.m. the Planning and Coordinating Task Force reconvened. They briefly reviewed the morning’s discussions and the relevance of the information technology they saw demonstrated to other state and local code enforcement departments.

Mr. Wible led the attendees through a review of each of the Task Force’s five work groups and noted which Task Force members had already signed up to work on which work groups. Attendees noted the work groups they would be interested in joining.

Mr. Wible will circulate the list of work groups to other Task Force members for them to consider signing on to work on those tasks over the balance of May and into June.

The five work groups are:

1. Writing up the Silicon Valley Joint Venture and Streamlining Model (Complete by June 15, 2003)
2. Drafting the Business Case for Regulatory Streamlining Using Information Technology (Complete by May 30, 2003)
3. Assembling Model Enabling Legislation and Regulations for Streamlining (Complete by June 30, 2003)
4. Drafting a guide for "selling" IT and regulatory streamlining to elected officials (Complete by June 30, 2003)
5. Drafting Federal Grant Criteria for States and Localities to apply for funding to assist in the implementation of regulatory streamlining best practices identified by the National Alliance (Complete by June 30, 2003)

The timetable for each of these work groups was discussed (and indicated in parenthesis above). It was noted that input received in the reports given earlier in the day would serve as the basis for a number of the above Alliance work products. These work products are currently being funded by both in-kind services of Alliance members and funding from the U. S. Department of Energy under the National Alliance grant with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

At 3:30 pm Mr. Wible once again thanked Mr. Rodriguez and the City of Milpitas for hosting the Task Force meeting and the meeting was adjourned.

The next meeting of the Alliance’s Planning and Coordinating Task Force will be held in the Washington, D.C., area June 26, 2003.