City of Chesapeake, Virginia Selects Accela Civic Cloud to Streamline Key Government Services

SAN RAMON, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 19, 2013) - Accela, Inc., the leading provider of civic engagement solutions for government agencies, announced the City of Chesapeake, Virginia, has selected the Accela Civic Cloud to streamline and automate key land management processes. This initiative falls directly in line with Mayor Alan P. Krasnoff's push towards the City's embracing advancing technologies. The solutions provided by the Civic Cloud will help the City manage all land use and community development activities. This will allow business owners, developers, citizens, and agency staff to access information instantly, making the process of getting from application to occupancy more efficient while improving transparency.

With a population of over 226,000, Chesapeake blends rural and urban centers and is home to more than 65 large corporations. The agency's goal in selecting Accela is to increase local economic growth by simplifying processes associated with opening and running businesses while making it easier for companies of all sizes to work with the City.

By providing the Civic Cloud, Accela is helping the City of Chesapeake keep infrastructure at a minimum while supporting disaster recovery and continuity of operations needs that are critical to both citizens and agency operations. Chesapeake will use the Accela Civic Cloud to streamline key government services including permitting, inspections and plan reviews.

Specifically, the City of Chesapeake will use:

• Accela Land Management: Manages building permit activities from application to approval. Mirroring existing business processes, the solution will provide staff with the exact business information and workflow needed to perform individual job functions. Land Management will also handle all types of regulatory activities, from one-time processes such as residential construction permitting to annually renewable activities.
  
  
• Accela Mobile Office: Improves mobile workforce efficiency for government workers. Designed specifically for field use and leveraging the latest in mapping technology, Accela Mobile Office helps users plan, route and result inspections; create code enforcement cases; and manage asset inventories and condition assessments from the field.
  
  
• Accela GIS: Provides a robust solution for leveraging an agency's geospatial data to improve decision-making and streamline processes. Provides a geographic view of all land-use, zoning and infrastructure information associated with parcels, permits, inspections, code cases, assets, work orders or service requests.
  
  
• Accela Citizen Access: Delivers a cost-effective way to move traditional counter and call center services to the web, providing citizens with easy and convenient multi-language online access to permitting, licensing, rental registration; requests for services, or other automated services. Through the streamlining of processes and more self-service options for customers, City tasks that had previously taken days to complete can now in some cases be self-issued by customers over the Internet. These efficiencies leave staff more time to focus on other job functions, and leave contractors, business owners, homeowners and other members of the community more time to attend to the demands of their busy schedules.
  
  

"The City of Chesapeake truly understands how simplifying the processes that business owners follow to open and operate their companies can significantly bolster economic development at the local level," said Maury Blackman, Accela CEO and President. "We're proud to partner with the City to help them achieve their goals of providing more transparent and streamlined access to city services."

About Accela
Accela, Inc. provides the leading civic engagement platform, powering thousands of services and millions of transactions daily for large and small public agencies worldwide. We connect government to people and accelerate and streamline land management, licensing, asset management, and public health and safety processes. Accela's Civic Cloud includes a complete platform, both packaged and tailored solutions and cloud-based, office, mobile and social applications to support government agency, business and citizen needs. Accela is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., with international offices in Australia and the United Arab Emirates. For more information, visit www.accela.com.

Media Contact:
Erica Harvill
Accela, Inc.
[phone]
[e-mail]