Sustainable Practices and Local Values: Fruita’s Path to Cloud-Based Permitting

On Wednesday, October 4, 2023, the City of Fruita’s City Planner, Henry Hemphill, and Planning Technician, Kelli McLean, joined our webinar Sustainable Practices and Local Values: Fruita’s Path to Cloud-Based Permitting, to share their perspective with Cloudpermit. They were also joined by Cloudpermit’s Sales Director for the West, Jake Wolff, and Sales Support, Shak Gobért. They shared their expertise, gave a software demo, and hosted a Q&A session with attendees.

Take a look at our webinar summary and fill in your information to access the full webinar.

Background on the City of Fruita:

• Beautiful home-rule municipality in Colorado with over 13K residents
• Brought building permits in-house in early 2023 with Cloudpermit and has since issued over 500 permits online
• Now uses online building permitting, planning & zoning, and code enforcement
• No longer requires people to post and print plans on-site since plans are online
• Fast tracks gathering information for faster building permits and planning approvals to offer services aligned with city values
• Focus on lifestyle, economic health, and quality of place

What has your experience been like using Cloudpermit?

Hemphill explained that Fruita was able to build trust and transparency with Cloudpermit during the sales and implementation process: “I’m really satisfied with the experience we’ve had so far.”

McLean also shared her positive experiences with Cloudpermit, and said, “So, one of the things that I was impressed by is that we have a payment system already set up, and Cloudpermit was one of the few that would actually jump through those hoops and got us connected. That was a big deal for us.”

How does Cloudpermit align with your city’s values?

Fruita’s team explained that the city is a home-rule municipality that is focused on lifestyle, economic health, and quality of place.

During the webinar, Hemphill explained that those are Fruita’s building blocks to provide a high level of core services that must work in tandem. When they were looking at software providers, they considered who could align with their values and chose Cloudpermit to bring permits online.

At a high level, the customer service was there and like I said before, it was 100% transparent. They’ve been great to work with throughout, and that hasn’t changed or deviated,” shared Fruita’s City Planner. “...I feel like Cloudpermit’s values have helped create a software program more geared towards those core services.”

He continued, “People are saving time, money, and energy by being able to not only apply for a permit, but request inspections and submit all their documents online.”

McLean added that Cloudpermit has improved communication since they use the software’s messaging system on a daily basis.

So, when people have questions, they can just simply ask, and we can all see it and answer,” she said. “I feel like that’s really important to be able to get answers at a decent speed, and that also increases our transparency.”

What changes have you made since moving building permits online?

Paper building permits used to be submitted to the county before they were brought in-house in Fruita with Cloudpermit. This was a big change for the city.

Now, Fruita has a kiosk to help residents using a hands-on approach for customer service.

So, taking a new building department, taking all the building codes we have adopted, and transitioning to pretty much all online using the technology that’s provided has been a huge change, but really a positive change for everybody involved,” said Hemphill. “...the front desk kiosk has been a huge asset; we’re really excited about that. We’re happy for the opportunity we have as a team.”