Cleaning Up the Septic System Permit Process
The West Piedmont, VA, Health District goes high-tech when it comes to digging below ground
August 12th, 2009 Comment on this article
The West Piedmont, VA, Health District is going high-tech when it comes to digging below ground. By using Laserfiche to enable instant access to digging permits, this branch of the Virginia State Health Department has expedited the process of digging wells and septic systems for new real estate development in this scenic slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It’s the Health District’s job to make sure cesspools are kept far away from wells that provide a neighborhood’s drinking water. But an outdated records system and a building boom in this part of the state made locating old septic systems and issuing new digging permits too time-consuming for the shorthanded district staff.
That all changed when Laserfiche provided the district with a high-speed, Web-based content management system that’s catching the eye of other districts across the state.
“It’s like going from black and white TV with rabbit ear antennae to HDTV and satellites,” says district manager Tim Baker. “It’s an enormous leap forward in our typical way of doing business.”
The real estate boom of the 1990s had swamped Baker’s staff with septic system and well permit applications as a wave of real estate brokers and developers, second home owners and retirees began to move into this once-rural section of Virginia. New residents were accustomed to near-instantaneous information access, and West Piedmont’s antiquated filing system wasn’t up to the task, requiring equal parts of luck and experience to find anything.
Marking the exact location of these facilities in West Piedmont and surrounding areas was crucial to beginning any new development. Without knowing the exact locations of old septic systems and leech fields, it’s unsafe to dig new ones. Unfortunately, due to the district’s hodgepodge filing system, locating them meant laboriously combing through file cabinets in an attempt to find the requested information.
It was a paperwork bottleneck. Baker and his staff knew they needed a solution, but it had to be affordable, easy to implement and easy to operate. In 2000, West Piedmont business director Charles Toothman came back from a technology trade show convinced that Laserfiche was the solution, and the district’s request for contractors’ bids went out soon after.
West Piedmont was soon scanning thousands of well and septic system permits into a Laserfiche system serving the district’s three Health Department offices. Generations of paper records and a byzantine filing system quickly gave way to a password-protected digital repository.
Health district inspectors used to spend hours, or even days, looking through cabinets crammed full of permits filed by subdivision name, mobile home park name, owner’s name or tax map number. Now, inspectors can use any or all of that information to instantly retrieve the files they need.
“It would take staff hours pulling paper to find these things; now we can find them in about 30 seconds,” Baker says. “Even if we don’t have the document a client’s looking for, we can tell them so right away, rather than searching for a day or two and coming up empty. Laserfiche just saves everybody so much time.”
That success has snowballed. West Piedmont’s three district offices were soon networked together, enabling inspectors to access all the district’s permit files from any of the three offices. A Laserfiche WebLink public portal enables authorized personnel to access documents from anywhere in the state via the Internet. Baker says that soon, local zoning and building departments will be able to gain access through the password-driven security system included in the Laserfiche product suite.
Officials in other Virginia health districts have also shown an interest in the West Piedmont installations, so Baker will deliver a presentation at the biannual meeting of the health district department heads this spring. He suspects other districts could see the same benefits from Laserfiche that West Piedmont has.
“I am pretty familiar with most other health departments, and their filing systems are very similar to ours—at least the way ours used to be,” he says.
Indeed, Laserfiche could also work wonders with the other areas within the far-reaching responsibilities of the State Health Department. Says Adam Wright, a Laserfiche reseller who assisted West Piedmont with their installation, “The state provides many services, all of which could benefit greatly from this system.
“Your return on investment is so fast, it’s just a matter of months before you get your money back. I want people to really understand, there is a faster, more efficient way to do these things. Why not do it?”