Customers share candid assessments of permitting system
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Source: Customers share candid assessments of permitting system ↗ Last modified: Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:07:38 GMT
The City of Portland sought the views of 2,661 building permit customers between June 11 and June 25. These customers applied for various types of construction-related permits between March 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024. Four hundred sixty-five customers submitted responses, achieving a participation rate of 17 percent.
The results indicate that improvements made to the City’s permitting processes have some effect on customer satisfaction and that more work is needed.
This survey builds on two similar efforts from 2021 and 2022 ↗. (No survey was conducted in 2023.) The core questions in this survey focused on:
- The ease or difficulty with which customers experienced different phases of the permit cycle
- Levels of satisfaction with different types of engagement with City permitting staff
- Areas of the permit cycle on which to prioritize future improvements
Engagements with City experts achieve higher marks for satisfaction
Respondents were mostly positive when asked to rate their levels of satisfaction with different types of engagement with City permitting experts. Excluding the “not applicable” responses, customers rated highly their engagements with City staff over email (53.3 percent “satisfied” or “very satisfied”) and by phone (53.2 percent “satisfied” or “very satisfied”) to address questions and concerns. These numbers indicate improvements over 2022 results, in which 43.4 percent of respondents indicated some level of satisfaction with their email correspondence with City staff, and 45.3 percent indicated satisfaction with their phone interactions with City staff.
Customers also rated highly their experiences with free 15-minute appointments ↗ with City staff to ask questions before submitting their permit applications: 64.2 percent rated their experiences as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” in the latest survey, compared with 61.6 percent in 2022 (again excluding the “not applicable” responses).
“Most reviewers I have worked with have been very helpful, quick to respond, and descriptive in their checksheet items,” said one customer.
“I definitely appreciate the phone calls from examiners pre-checksheet that have often allowed small changes to be made to the prints without having to invoke the checksheet process. More of that please,” wrote another customer.