One of the main mo­ti­va­tions for the City of Las Vegas to pur­sue a part­ner­ship with Code for America is in its ef­fort to dra­mat­i­cally im­prove the way it does its de­vel­op­ment ser­vices with small busi­nesses that want to lo­cate in the city. During the fel­low­ship year, we de­cided to fo­cus on a small por­tion of the de­vel­op­ment ser­vices process, rather than the en­tire sys­tem.

We cre­ated the Las Vegas Development Fastpass to im­prove the ex­pe­ri­ence of a cus­tomer nav­i­gat­ing through com­pli­cated city processes, to re­duce the amount of bar­ri­ers that stymied small busi­ness de­vel­op­ment in the city, and to en­cour­age shar­ing of data be­tween de­part­ments, and to re­duce in­ter­de­part­men­tal mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

The ap­pli­ca­tion at­tempts to match a prospec­tive busi­ness owner with the best lo­ca­tion to start their busi­ness in Las Vegas, based on how well their busi­ness matches with zon­ing and po­ten­tially any num­ber of ex­ist­ing con­di­tions on the prop­erty. Once a prop­erty is se­lected, the user has all the in­for­ma­tion to pro­ceed with the next steps of the de­vel­op­ment per­mit­ting and re­view process.