It’s easy to question whether society benefits when governments require people to get a permit or license to engage in almost every activity. Why, for example, do most places require people get a license before they have the ability to cut hair or put a shed in the back yard?
But if governments are going to require licenses for such things, they have the ability to at least make it relatively easy for qualified people who cough up the requisite fees to acquire such licenses.
The city of Houston apparently agrees with this philosophy because it’s upgrading its Web site such that citizens can get almost any license or permit at any hour of day without setting foot in a government office.
Houston signed a contract back in Might with GovPartner, a company that builds such e-permitting systems and reports speedy progress on the Houston project:
Working in record time, the GovPartner team finished Phase 1 by migrating the City from its old mainframe system to the advanced, 100% .NET web-based CommunityDevelopmentPartner system. By July, the migration was complete, customizations were added to fit Houston’s specific processes and staff were trained.
The next phase in the CommunityDevelopmentPartner project is to establish an on the web portal that grants the community to complete the entire process online from work or home via easy point and click.
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