Government and Civic · Community
Dawn Takeuchi Apuna made Honolulu's building permits work like TurboTax
Honolulu, Hawai'i
Honolulu's top permitting official pointed an AI reviewer at building-permit paperwork so applicants find out what's wrong with their plans before they wait months to hear it, and set a date to make it standard for everyone.
The person and the place
Dawn Takeuchi Apuna directs Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting, which handles roughly 20,000 building permit applications a year for the city and county.
The problem Apuna cared about
Honolulu's permitting system ran on outdated software, and applicants were routinely bounced back for incomplete or noncompliant plans, adding months to projects before anyone told them what to fix.
The agency moment
Apuna's department piloted an AI plan-review tool, CivCheck, starting in 2022, built on a platform from Clariti Software, and required it for residential permit applicants starting September 1, 2026. Until then, a temporary incentive program, Priority Review, is getting applicants to try it early. "It's kind of like TurboTax for permitting," Apuna said. "The AI really helps guide applicants through a much better quality application, and then in turn it means less review cycles and faster turnaround."
What changed, with evidence
in the department's own comparison, average review time on permits that went through CivCheck fell from 73 days to about 32, and the average number of review cycles dropped from 3.4 to 1.4, a difference DPP says held across an early sample of 19 CivCheck permits against 17 similar ones that skipped it. "We recognize that 19 completed applications is a relatively small sample," DPP spokesperson Davis Pitner said, "however, those results are consistent with what we observed during DPP's earlier six-month CivCheck pilot program."
The move worth copying
Apuna didn't wait for a perfect dataset before fixing a broken process. She ran the pilot, let the numbers build, then picked a hard date to make it standard for every residential applicant instead of leaving it optional forever. Know a city office still making people guess what's wrong with their paperwork? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"It's kind of like TurboTax for permitting." — Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, StateScoop
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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