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Department of Building Inspection Customer Communication

DBI Update – Improved Permit Status Info in Online PTS
July 27, 2023
Addenda details

Dear Customers,

We have great news to share. Today, we are taking another big step forward in our commitment to provide greater clarity and transparency in plan review.

The online Permit Tracking System (PTS) now provides the exact status of your permit application and documents the most recent activity on a set of plans.

You can see the date of the most recent activity by the staff plan checker, your architect, engineer, contractor or design professional, or yourself, and the result of the plan review performed at each permitting station. This feature also informs you of whether your project’s plan review is awaiting action from the City or you and your design professional.

Further, the online PTS now shows if comments have been issued on a project, the nature of those comments, whether the project was revised and submitted for a City recheck, what permitting station is conducting the recheck and how many review cycles (also known as rechecks) have occurred.

Above is an example how the new information appears in the online PTS.

As you can see, there are two new columns “Rev#” and “Review Result” and significantly more information in the “Hold Description” column.

“Rev#” indicates the number of review cycles (rechecks) that have been required of the plan submission.

“Review Result” column provides the project status.  “ON HOLD” will no longer be a standalone status in PTS. Here are the statuses that you’ll see instead and what they mean:

Status                                 Meaning 

Approved                         Plans are ready to be advanced to the next station/step.

Approved stipulated     Plans are ready to be advanced but the customer needs to take
                                           additional action for a Department of Public Works (DPW)
                                           requirement. 

Issued comments         Plans are not approved as the applicant needs to respond to
                                          comments. When this status is entered, a new row will
                                          automatically appear in PTS below the existing row
                                          for the next entry.

Admin                              Administrative step that will not be counted in plan review
                                          or customer response times. 

In progress                     City staff are actively performing plan review. 

Denied                             Plans are not approved by this review station. 

These new features are available for all permit applications submitted as of today or previously submitted permit applications that have not yet been assigned or are currently being reviewed.

We hope you find these new features and additional transparency informative and helpful. This is just the first of many important improvements we’re making to PTS so it will be a better tool for our staff, offer better service to you, and help us do our work more efficiently.

Thank you for your ongoing support and partnership.