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.