The Department of City Planning oversees the historically cumbersome process of evaluating land-use applications city-wide. The process is intricate and complicated, as it impacts building owners, city planners, and the surrounding communities whose daily lives are affected by land use changes. The process has long been recognized as time consuming and expensive.
With this in mind, the DCP started an internal initiative known as BluePRint - or DCP Business Process Reform. The development of the new review process was a result of collaboration with industry professionals. The intent of this new internal initiative is to simplify the process, as it is also part of the Bloomberg Administration commitment to business in general. This commitment is to improve customer service and to help businesses interact with city agencies.
Starting with a clean slate, the DCP spent 18 months meticulously scrutinizing the existing process and building a new one. Research indicated that the DCP needed to break the major bottleneck at the pre-certification review - or the step in which the DCP and the developers/property owners develop their actual proposal. In this stage, the applicant engages in extensive environmental and technical analysis, which builds the case for their proposal. Proposals that were better thought out and organized would lead to faster adoption downstream.
BluePRint's goal, as stated by the DCP, is to reduce the time most projects spend in pre-certification. Reducing this time will lead towards having a clear and predictable review process for both the applications and agency staff. Once BluePRint is in full effect, not only will the review of applications be faster, but it will also save applicants time and money. By doing this, BluePRint will also be getting projects built in a more efficient manner. The new process, which was unveiled on July 2nd, answers this goal, with a comprehensive transformation of the DCP's internal review procedure.
BluePRint leads with very clear applications standards, which feeds into a coordinated review process involving multiple specialized divisions within DCP. Like the evolution we have seen with the DOB, the reviewers will access each application earlier in the process, in parallel, to raise issues earlier on. A comprehensive tracking system will provide status updates for applicants, and will provide the DCP with internal metrics of how the system is performing.
BluePRint will certainly face some issues during the early implementation. Like many other new programs that we have seen over the last few years, we can confidently say the program will be monitored and tweaked based on results and feedback. The program should roll out completely by 2015. This will give everyone an ample amount of time to comment on the new system and see the possible effects of it.
As always, we are hopeful for better results and excited to see the progress in the future.
Frank Fortino is the president & CEO of Metropolis Group, Inc., New York, N.Y. Tags: