How Kansas City Makes Small Businesses Thrive

Tyler Podcast Episode 5, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and Content Marketing Director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary:

We learn how this innovative city made it easier for businesses to conduct business with the city. And we find out what might be the best barbecue in town.

Transcript:

Rick Usher: The worst thing that we were doing was we were using the customer as our internal communication system. So we'd say, "I need a copy of the fire inspection before I can issue this liquor license. Go down the hall and talk to the fire marshal, bring me a copy of the latest fire inspection. I need to know that the building department's issued you a certificate of occupancy." If you're at the health department, "I need to know these things. You bring me these things." So a lot of disjointed activity.

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech Podcast, where we explore issues facing communities today, and do so in a way that's both interesting and entertaining. I'm your host, Jeff Harrell. My promise to you is to help break through the clutter and provide great information in a format that's super easy to consume. And maybe, just maybe, we'll have a little bit of fun along the way.

Jeff Harrell: Well, the issue we explore today is a real life story about an innovative city that wanted to make life a little bit easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs, by eliminating outdated technology and processes. (singing)

Jeff Harrell: That's right, we are in Kansas City, Missouri. Located in the heartland of the United States. It's the 38th biggest city in the United States, known for barbecue, jazz, heritage, and fountains. The city sits on Missouri's Western edge. What was once a hard luck sports town, Kansas City has now seen recent big time success winning both the 2015 World Series, and of course, the Chiefs winning Super Bowl 54 earlier this year. Did I mention it's known for barbecue? Well, I wanted to find out what is the best barbecue in Kansas City. So I asked Rick usher. Rick is the assistant city manager for small business and entrepreneurship here in Kansas City.

Rick Usher: If you like brisket burnt ends, pulled pork, I mean, it's all here right in the center of the country. My favorite actually is Arthur Bryant's.

Jeff Harrell: We had to ask the folks at Arthur Bryant's, what makes their barbecue so very special?

Arthur Bryant (spokesperson): The original sauce is unlike anything you'll ever taste. The wood that we use, the hickory, the oak, is just a blend of all of those things. And the atmosphere is just unmatched. If you want a unique experience in barbecue, good old fashioned, down home barbecue, without the decor, you come to Arthur Bryant's, if you want great food.

Jeff Harrell: Okay. Anybody else suddenly hungry for barbecue? Well, as it turns out, Kansas city is a great place for business too. Here's Rick Usher.

Rick Usher: I think we say in the start of a community, that your runway is longer in Kansas City, just because of the cost of living. The life we're living right now with remote work and distance learning, just a few months ago, FlexJobs, I think is the name of the company, named Kansas City the number one city to work in for remote workers, because we have gigabit Google Fiber serving, likely, a million residents in the region here. And then the cost of living is so low.

Rick Usher: The other cool thing is, so we don't have coasts or mountains, but you're only three and a half hours away from them by plane in any direction. In fact, we've interviewed a guy who is a remote work employee for a company named Urban Leap. He's a sales manager. He was excited about Kansas City because, when he's making his travels, he can get anywhere to any client in the country within that three and a half, four hours. Whereas if you're out on the coast, you're making a day of it. At least there's a lot of that we have going for us.

Jeff Harrell: It's small businesses like Arthur Bryant's that Kansas City wanted to continue to help. So specifically, they recognized an enormous pain when it comes to accessing permits needed to operate a business. Here's Rick Usher describing the problem.

Rick Usher: The worst thing that we were doing was we were using the customer as our internal communication system. So we'd say, "I need a copy of the fire inspection before I can issue this liquor license. Go down the hall and talk to the fire marshal, bring me a copy of the latest fire inspection. I need to know that the building department's issued you a certificate of occupancy." If you're at the health department, "I need to know these things. You bring me these things." So a lot of disjointed activity.

Updating Techology

Jeff Harrell: So Rick, how did you know that you needed to turn to updated technology to solve this problem?

Rick Usher: I was in the building department back in the '90s when the Y2K problems came up. Remember, everybody was pushing for a Y2K solution.

Jeff Harrell: Oh, yeah.

Rick Usher: So we, at that point, put together a similar group of departments to put together an RFP. I was in the building department at the time, codes administration. We went to the IT department, went to the manager's office, and just said, "Look, we're all trying to solve the same problems. We're all doing permitting inspections." At that time, I think we had 117 different databases, everything from Excel spreadsheets. We had Lotus Notes forms. I'm not sure ... Anyway, we had a whole bunch of homegrown systems that we tried to find ways to make them talk to each other.

Rick Usher: When we put out the RFP for the system now that Tyler was successful in becoming our vendor, we again kept 10 departments. So really, my job as executive sponsor in the city manager's office was basically to keep everybody on the bus. Identify who needs to be here, have staff go do a needs assessment, start looking at where there's shared data. Kind of a fun exercise our city communications office did when we were branding this, and they came up with the Compass KC branding, was we asked all the departments to come to a meeting and bring us a copy of your permit and inspection forms. And when you laid all that out, it looked like, if you were the customer, you would feel like you're working with 12 different jurisdictions.

Rick Usher: Compass KC is our citywide permitting system. It's hard to really put it in a box of permitting system. I joke that my revenge for hanging around city hall for 34 years is to finally make my way into the city manager's office so that we do implement a citywide system.

Jeff Harrell: What was life like for businesses before Compass KC?

Rick Usher: Prior to Compass, you're struggling I think to find your application requirements. They might have been scattered across the city's webpages. You probably were struggling with just the travel time and the disruption. It might actually take you a week to make contact with all the departments you need to and get everything you need done. So there was a lot of burden we were putting on customers to bring us information that we could easily get from another department.

 

Biggest Benefits

Jeff Harrell: What do you feel like is the biggest benefit to businesses that you've seen?

Rick Usher: A lot of that we're experiencing right now. When you're working with a business community, they want streamlined, reliable, basically expedited customer service. And they want you to have ... really, we've been pushed to have more of a virtual city hall, like a 24/7 city hall. And today, with the stay-at-home orders and the social distancing that's required, really what I'm seeing is we implemented social distancing processes a year and a half ago when we implemented Compass KC. And then we have numbers showing, just in our planning department, we reduced walk-in customer traffic in the permit office by over 2,400 people.

Jeff Harrell: Wow.

Rick Usher: With the same workload. Just some quick numbers. In 2017, they had 8,345 walk-in customers, 21,577 permits processed. 2018, 8,086 walk-in customers, about the same workload, 21,017 permits. 2019, so this is four or five months after the implementation of Compass KC, they had 5,818 walk-in customers in that first full year of activity, and 21,114 permits process. So same workload, but like 2,400 fewer walk-in customers. Because architects are submitting their plans electronically, our plans examiners are reviewing those and sending the comments back, obviously through the same system, payments are made electronically, responses to plan and view comments. But the real key was making more of our permits accessible to just the general public. General contractors, but even homeowners could submit a site plan to build a detached garage or to build an addition to their house or remodel their house. Do all of that electronically, not have to come down to city hall. Do it on their own schedule, and make those payments, which we're happy to have so we can continue to provide services. That's been the biggest benefit.

Rick Usher: Then it also lets staff manage where their employees are focused throughout the day. You've got walk-in customers. I know when I managed the permit division, you'd have a big peak of customers 11:00 in the morning, another big peak of customers at 2:00 in the afternoon. If you're getting those applications electronically now, you can distribute that workload a lot more consistently and across the department.

Jeff Harrell: What have the benefits been for the city?

Rick Usher: Now with it shared in the database, really, what we've transformed that worked, that our permit staff and inspectors investigators are doing is we're not just running through checklists now, we're looking at the real issues. So if you're taking a liquor license application or a permit application, the way the system is designed, you're only going to see the outstanding conditions of approval. You're not going to see the ones that are already met. And really, the history of that had been, fire marshall makes annual inspections. There's always a current inspection report, but you had to walk down and print out a copy of it to bring it back to an office. So there was a lot of footwork.

Jeff Harrell: We'll be back with Rick Usher, the assistant city manager for small business and entrepreneurship, in just a moment. If you're interested in learning more about some of the biggest obstacles local government is facing today in community development, we've got lots of great content on our resource center. Just go to tylertech.com and click resources on the top of the page. You can then filter by inter gov to get the latest content, including a recent article in American City and County about how El Cajon, California implemented a way for citizens to connect in the wake of COVID-19. I think you'll find the content very helpful. Now, back to our conversation with Rick Usher.

Jeff Harrell: We're having this interview during the COVID epidemic or stay-at-home orders going on right now. There's probably going to be a rush to move to more of an online system like you guys did. We hear a lot about flattening the curve right now. You guys were ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing this. What advice would you give cities who are now thinking about this, now that you've gone through this yourself?

Rick Usher: The process that we set up is that the leadership comes from the city manager's office. If you're a strong mayor form of government, I guess you'd want that to come from your mayor's office or your chief of staff. I was assigned as the project sponsor. I have a few staff who report directly to me, but otherwise, I'm just working with a team of department representatives that we meet with monthly.

Rick Usher: We set up a schedule of weekly team meetings. You come to that meeting whether your department's issue is top of the agenda or not. What happens is that departments are learning from each other. When you look at the adoption of technology across a city the size of Kansas City, we have 4,400 employees in 18, 20 different city departments, you're going to have technology adoption. Even in some cases where we were taking staff that were still using clipboards and pre-printed forms to go do their inspections, and then giving that to someone when they got back in the office, who would then do data entry. To the other extreme being departments like health, where they're taking computers and scanners and small printers into the field with them, and everything they're doing throughout the day is done electronically.

Rick Usher: Key advice though is form a leadership structure, have your bimonthly meeting with the city manager and all the city departments, so the department heads are getting that message from the city manager about the progress that's being made. And then you have the weekly meetings of the subject matter experts across departments, so that we're all working together to streamline our processes.

Rick Usher: I gave you the number there on the number of permits that were issued in 2019. That's probably maybe even more permitting activity because we also decreased a lot of permit types. One project, I was working with the University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School, where they have a Law of Technology, Public Policy course that helps us troubleshoot issues and ideas. So they reviewed what we called our checklist for land development plan review. And then they also reviewed what I was calling the plumber's dilemma. That if you're building a single family house, this is like three years ago, the plumber had to take out five or six permits from three different city departments.

Rick Usher: So you're taking out a plumbing permit to do the general plumbing in the house. You're taking out a water connection permit to tap the water main in the street. You got to get an excavation permit to dig up that water main in the street. You get a sewer connection permit from public works to connect to the public sewer. And then another excavation permit to dig up that public sewer. If that street is a boulevard or a parkway, you're going to parks and recreation for a permit to disturb the boulevard. We reduced that to, I believe it's down to two permits now.

Jeff Harrell: Wow.

Rick Usher: What you do by being on the shared database is build in the inspection process for water services or public works into the permit to plumb the house. Because you know, if you're building a new house, you have to do these things. And if you don't have to do these things, you take them out of the workflow. But generally, the big issue at the end of the day from departments was, "That's all fine, but is the revenue going to show up in my account?" So a nice win that we got out of this was we got everybody on the same payment platform. Our finance department participated with us. They said, "Okay, we're all going to be on the same payment platform." You manage all the account numbers. You manage all the fund distribution. That's been another success of the project.

Jeff Harrell: If you had to narrow it down to maybe the top three benefits to the city from this initiative, what would those three things be?

Rick Usher: The increased communication, data sharing across departments. The flexibility like the workflow flexibility of when applications come in and when you're processing those. You can manage peaks and valleys a little better than having a lot of walk-in customers. And the collaboration across departments. We've built up trust between departments. And as we've had to implement say new permit types ... Because in the middle of all of this, Airbnb hit the Midwest, and we had to create a short-term stay permit type. We were able to do that and implement that. That included bringing two or three different departments into that permitting setup. Those seem probably like my top three.

Jeff Harrell: That's great.

Rick Usher: Another recommendation is to work closely with your business community, the engineering architecture design community. Keep the communication high with them so that they know what you're working on. Another recommendation, I guess, to cities, it's cool to support startups and small tech companies, but for projects of this scale, you need a larger company, like in this case, Tyler, that has the capacity to really build a full scale program. Because we've had a lot of vendors that are like, "Hey, you need to use my payment app. Well, that's fine, but does it do inspections and permitting, and does it update the land record?" There's a lot that doesn't happen when you go those ways.

Jeff Harrell: Rick, we really appreciate you sharing your experience with us. How can folks connect with you?

Rick Usher: I'm really active on Twitter. So @rukcmo is my Twitter handle. Tweeted a lot there about our Tyler, Compass KC relationship, especially in this time of remote work. And email address is Richard.usher@kcmo.org, for those not social media savvy.

Jeff Harrell: Awesome. Hey, Rick, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Man, stay safe out there.

Rick Usher: All right. You too. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Jeff Harrell: Well, I love examples of cities using modern technology to solve important problems. I hope you took away a few valuable nuggets of information. I know I did. And hey, thanks for listening to this episode. We've got many more to come. I would love your feedback. You can actually email me at podcast@tylertech.com. Please leave us a review and subscribe. Hey, until next time, this is Jeff Harrell, director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies. We'll talk to you soon.