Case Study: City of Hudson, NY

The Municipality:

The City of Hudson is a City in Upstate New York. In recent years the volume of projects before the Hudson planning board increased significantly. Efforts to address New York’s housing crisis and an increase in tourism, have been driving forces behind this increased volume. As communities across upstate New York begin to see increased housing development to meet this demand, communities like Hudson may continue to see this volume increase. 

The Problem

Hudson had transitioned from a paper-based workflow to a manual digital process that was heavily reliant on email. With the increased volume of applications, the board and staff found handling project submissions, and the iterative design revisions that follow, needed improvement. 

Reviewing project submissions and revisions delivered by email was burdensome, as was manually downloading and organizing attachments for storage, public availability, and sharing. Maintaining transparency to the public during this process by posting project assets to the municipal website required yet more manual labor and was difficult for the public to follow. Hudson needed a better system for accepting, managing and providing access to their applicant’s proposals and associated project assets.  

The Solution

After conducting an assessment of other vendors in the market, and conducting a hands-on evaluation of MuniCollab, Hudson chose MuniCollab as its platform for accepting planning board applications, conducting project management and achieving public transparency. In a matter of weeks, MuniCollab configured a portal customized to Hudson’s specific planning board processes and had imported Hudson’s existing projects. Then MuniCollab implemented a number of improvements to the forms, including conditional fields to accommodate different questions for different types of projects and a space for the board’s engineering review staff to add their engineering reviews. 

The Outcome

By implementing MuniCollab, the City of Hudson has significantly reduced the staff time spent receiving and redistributing documents over email. This solution has eliminated the confusion caused by new versions of documents stemming from applicant revision. The system automatically updates to display the latest version of each document for the board, while still including a full project history of prior revisions.