| Commissioner's Corner by Dave Fuller, Allen County Building Commissioner |
 During the past few months, the City of Fort Wayne and Allen County Government have been working together to improve the process of doing business in Allen County. Specifically, we are looking at city and county ordinances (or the conflicts between them), areas of duplication and the overall permitting process. This is scheduled as an eighteen month, three phase project. It ultimately, will bring all 19 city and county departments that are involved with the routing process onto a single data base that will improve efficiency and timeliness of reviews, and provide on-line tracking capability by the developer/contractor/owner for the project status within every department involved throughout the routing process. This will work much like your current capability to track inspection activity of the building department. This will improve accountability of all parties involved in the routing and permitting process, and if problems or delays occur in approvals, it will be easy to see where the roadblocks are occurring. As a part of this project, a task force is actively working on developing an informational portal on the web which will provide a user friendly, easy to access, single site to gather information on the processes and requirements of each city and county department involved in the permitting and development process. This will make it much easier to find what you need by replacing the multitude of individual home pages that each city and county department currently has. There are a number of jurisdictions across the country that have developed a portal such as this and we have looked at quite a few (some really good and others not so good) to take advantage of the ideas others have implemented successfully. While the project has a pretty aggressive timeframe, our hope is that as the economy fully recovers, we will be ready to hit the ground running with a user friendly and efficient system that will improve the ability to develop and grow Allen County. RETIREMENT Many of you know Dale Bergman, our Sr. Plumbing Inspector. Dale has been on staff for a number of years and prior to joining Allen County, was a local plumbing contractor. Dale has decided it is time for him to slow down and recently announced his retirement effective December 28, 2011. Dale has been a joy to work with and we will miss him around the department. We wish him all the best and good health as he moves to this “non-working” phase of life. |
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