Online permitting in LI towns is long past due

Long-awaited efforts by North Hempstead and Oyster Bay towns to introduce new online building permit systems have the potential to vastly improve Long Island’s new construction and home improvement industries, benefiting homeowners and homebuyers alike.

While towns like Huntington and Hempstead have fully instituted online permitting systems that have been working well for a while, others have been slower to catch on. Smithtown just launched a new system and Islip and Babylon only recently approved moving forward with a new vendor to institute their own online permitting. But others, including East End towns like Riverhead, have had challenges in getting started — primarily in funding the initiatives and implementing the software.

This is a situation where the state’s “pro-housing” community designation could play a role. Those towns that have received the designation already have the opportunity to receive technical assistance from the state. Perhaps state officials should consider earmarking some funds toward helping pro-housing towns jump-start an online permitting system.

Homeowners in towns with online permitting say it can be an enormous time and money saver. The entire process — from submitting plans and providing necessary documentation to tracking a permit’s progress and answering questions or addressing concerns — becomes simpler. For developers who are coordinating multiple projects of varying sizes, an online system allows them to track everything in a given town in one place.

It also can reduce or even eliminate the need for expediters — middlemen who charge homeowners fees to help with and speed up the often slow and confounding permitting process.

A faster permitting process would eliminate one roadblock in the arduous process of building new homes and improving existing ones. Permitting has long been a complicated, lengthy procedure on Long Island, often taking months for the smallest of jobs. A better system could help the region in its broader efforts to build more housing, particularly truly affordable housing.

Town officials who don’t yet have full online permitting should learn from their neighbors and get their systems up and running. It’s 2025, after all. And in that vein of getting with the times, online systems at the village, town, county and state levels of government should be able to communicate with one another. Homeowners or builders who need approvals from other agencies, like the county Department of Health or Department of Public Works, or developers seeking state grants for housing, should have their applications and approvals automatically connected to one another. That kind of integrated, streamlined system would eliminate much of the burden, cost and time, making it that much easier to renovate and build here.

That, in turn, could move Long Island closer to two of its ultimate goals: expanding and improving the region’s economy, and developing the new housing the Island so desperately needs.