One Front Door, and a Human on the Other Side

Building a landing page where a master form lives and uses conditional logic to direct business owners and/or residents should not be a difficult thing to accomplish. With the advent of technology, creating a tool like this is more of a coordination within the city's Department of Technology and Innovation than anything else. The amount of websites and places someone needs to go to in order to find what they need is outrageous. It creates a dynamic that makes government look inefficient when it does not have to be that way.

I believe in government for good. I think that government should be able to simplify things, not make them harder. After hearing business owners complain how difficult it is to navigate the city's ecosystem of permits and licenses, I realized that part of it is simply not knowing where to go to get what they need in order to operate the business they have in mind or are already operating.

This only covers the technology aspect of the process and not the human aspect. One of the businesses testifying today said that she was fined and was appealing the fine but has been having a difficult time figuring out how to navigate the process of the fines and who to talk with in order to appeal and take those fines out of her record as an owner. This is where the human part comes in: why is it so hard to get a hold of someone, why is it so hard to get in touch with someone from the city? I understand part of it is because there are so many people that live in Philadelphia and the city does not have all the manpower to cover the cost of serving each person individually.

What I did not realize is that the city already has a tool that is a permit navigator tool, Philadelphia Permit Navigator, which has been poorly advertised. This tool can be a time saver for so many business owners who do not know where to go. It does not solve all the issues but it does help with due diligence, which is an important part of opening a business in Philadelphia or anywhere for that matter.

Tools like this should be the first thing anyone from the city who works in commerce should point to and eventually loop in the human part after a business owner has done their own due diligence. Why is this not promoted more? Why are businesses having to struggle just to access a useful tool like this? What other tools does the city have that we do not know of and could facilitate things? I remain with questions but feel optimistic to know that a tool like this already exists when I thought it didn't just a few hours ago.