Getting on the Same (web) Page: Locally-Based MuniCollab Software Makes Land-Use Planning and Development Dramatically More Efficient and Transparent

by Zac Shaw for Ulster Strong

The relationship between municipal governments, developers and the public has never been cozier thanks to two local technologists uniquely qualified and motivated to revolutionize local land-use planning boards with their cutting-edge software platform: MuniCollab.

MuniCollab co-founder Abe Uchitelle – known to many as the current Majority Leader of the Ulster County Legislature – provided a comprehensive look behind the scenes of the software that area municipalities are buzzing about.

“My co-founder [Lou Klepner] and I are both very passionate about local government and have been involved in various ways over the years,” he explained. “We really were asking ourselves, ‘How come the public sector doesn't have the same types of tools that we have enjoyed in the private sector?’”

Technology seems to revolutionize the private sector on a constant basis, but the public sector has been left woefully behind. Municipal governments lose countless hours of productivity in a messy patchwork of software solutions cobbled together over multiple administrations. Developers are inundated with reams of byzantine documentation that must be frequently revised and updated, while carefully conforming to municipal laws and codes. All the while, the public is left largely in the dark as to how the process works and how projects are progressing (or not progressing).

Uchitelle went on a listening tour of “town supervisors, mayors, city councils, town councils, village councils, people at every level of government” and soon noticed a pattern.

“Over and over and over again, we heard that planning boards are really in need of help,” he said. “And it makes sense. These are volunteer boards that are tasked with helping shape the future of every community that they serve.”

The MuniCollab team identified land use review and development as their beachhead market, and quickly set to work building the software they knew could alleviate the many pain points in the municipal land-use planning process.

For the government, MuniCollab practically eradicates the inefficiencies of legacy planning board systems – to the extent they could even be considered ‘systems’ – wherein even a simple revision entailed navigating a digital maze.

“The way that they used to work is if an applicant had a revision to a site plan, they would email that revision as an attachment,” he said. “The planning board administrator would open that email, download that attachment, upload that to the website, send it in another email to all of the applicants, and then try and keep track of everything in some folder just based on the file names. It's kind of confusing to tell which is the old version, which is the new version, and so on and so forth.

“When an applicant has a site plan revision and they're using MuniCollab, the applicant just uploads the revision, the document to the portal, and it immediately is available to the board. It's immediately available to the public. The planning board administrator gets a notification. And so it just completely changes the way they work. It makes things a lot simpler.”

One of the best things about MuniCollab is that it helps developers of every type, from big players with multimillion-dollar budgets to owner/operators, small local businesses and mom and pop stores.

“We're serving both with a totally new experience,” Uchitelle said. “For the large developers, they love the platform because they already have a bunch of people working on the project. All those people can collaborate using our software. They can all work on the application together. You can have an architect and an engineer working on the same application at the same time. If you have a large project team, that's great. It also means that you don't have to print out as many copies. Some municipalities require you to make dozens of copies of every application and every document. We've had developers come up to us and tell us that this could potentially save them tens of thousands of dollars on printing per project.

“So large developers absolutely love this, but the most important thing for me is knowing that smaller applicants are well served here, and it's such an easy process to submit an application.”

As any small business owner who has navigated a planning board review can attest, to say the process is not straightforward would be an understatement.

“For communities that don't use MuniCollab, typically what an individual has to do if they're applying to the planning board, is they have to go to the municipal website and there'll be this long list of documents to download and it's really hard to figure out which documents you download,” he said. “Usually there's a document that is just to tell you which documents that you need to submit, and then you really have to decipher what it is. There are these charts, it's really hard to figure out what documents are required, what documents are optional. You end up losing months and months and months going back and forth. Or maybe you just get intimidated by the whole process and don't decide to expand your restaurant to have outdoor dining or something along those lines, right?”

MuniCollab walks individuals through the planning process with the same ease folks have come to expect from private-sector web applications.

“We have a feature where we take the municipal code and we embed it in the form directly. So if you're answering a question about the site plan, the code about how your site plan should look is embedded in the form itself, so you no longer have to go digging through the code. We're walking you through the process. We're telling you what documents are required. If you indicate on the form that you have a residential project, it'll only ask you for residential documents. If you're indicating on the form that you have a commercial project, it's only gonna ask you for commercial projects. The forms are updating dynamically as the applicants are filling them out. So from the perspective of a small applicant, they're now on an even playing field when compared to some of these large developers that can hire a team of lawyers that are experts in submitting these planning board applications.”

The third and most numerous group of stakeholders – the public – get something invaluable and increasingly in demand from government: transparency.

“Members of the public now have a much more clear view as to what is happening with every single project and what the status is and what the latest revisions are, and they can receive updates if they're following along,” he said. “So it's definitely a benefit to the public to be able to follow along and figure out what's going on in their community.”

Now less than two years after founding the company, MuniCollab is already in use by several municipalities with more planned – and the future of land-use planning looks bright.

“We're really excited about the response that we've gotten,” he said. “You could look at an example right now with the city of Kingston. They launched a public portal a couple of months ago, and if you went there right now, you would see a map with all the projects that are under review in the city of Kingston. You would see a list next to that map that outlines all of those projects. And if you clicked on those projects, you'd be able to see all of the information that the applicants have provided, all of the files, all the site plans – everything involved with the whole approval process is all stored in one place.”

MuniCollab doesn’t just make the land-use planning review process more frictionless. By greatly reducing delays, developers and communities can benefit financially by maintaining momentum while keeping the public fully in the loop.

“If you look at some of these projects, another month could be a huge difference in an interest rate that a large project, a multimillion dollar project, could save hundreds of thousands of dollars on interest alone just because a delay caused an extra couple of months,” he said.

“Public sentiment may even change due to the delays. Whereas if things are getting done, public sentiment seems to be more supportive when they see things happening, right? People tend to get upset when it feels like things are happening in isolation. So by making them visible to the public, I think just that alone makes things more palatable for the public, because they know that nothing is happening behind closed doors.”

Could MuniCollab bridge the yawning gap between businesses pursuing large land-use projects and “NIMBY” residents who frequently do battle against seemingly any type of development? There’s hope.

“If you look at the way that some of these fights happen, a lot of the fights are not even really focused on the actual substance of the project,” he said. “It's focused on the way the information was shared, and is all the information being shared. So just having a platform that allows things to happen in a transparent way, we believe it is going to turn down the temperature on a lot of these conflicts because everybody is gonna be on an even playing field. Everyone's gonna have access to the same information.”

Uchitelle is similarly optimistic about MuniCollab’s future, in which he sees gradual expansion of the platform to solve more of the myriad problems plaguing technologically-outdated municipal governments.

“Our long term vision is to solve a much broader set of problems by creating a single platform that is really driven around municipal collaboration… a very robust and universal municipal collaboration platform for a lot of projects, not just land use review projects.”

Municipalities, developers and the public will be rooting for them behind their overflowing inboxes and stacks of print-outs.