Obtaining a business or residential permit in San Francisco is like that check-engine light on your car: a big fix that you keep putting off, even though you need to do it.

Since taking office in January 2025, Mayor Daniel Lurie has attempted to bring the city’s byzantine permitting system into the shop, promising a one-stop, modernized platform, PermitSF, that would make life easier for residents and businesses.

But an investigation by The Standard reveals that the project has faced significant setbacks. Former employees of OpenGov, the firm hired to oversee the overhaul under controversial circumstances, said the govtech company had internal doubts about the city’s deadlines. 

City employees said the software, which was procured through a no-bid contract, lacks critical features that have led to delays in the permitting revamp — criticism that mirrors concerns voiced last summer when the mayor’s office was choosing software for the project. Lurie had given the city a year to get a new permitting system up and running, and his office said OpenGov was the only company that could meet the aggressive timeline.

OpenGov’s $5.9 million contract with the city — eight times higher than the average new software contract procured through no-bid contracts — was supposed to deliver a full slate of permits on the new platform by March. Roughly two months later, less than half are available on the website. 

“It’s been amateur hour, to be honest. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” one city worker told The Standard. “The ability to spin absolute failures as success is absolutely wild to me.”

The mayor’s office is defending its progress, all while seeking a renewal of the OpenGov contract that will go before the Civil Service Commission on Monday. 

Here are five takeaways from The Standard’s story.

After OpenGov was selected by the mayor’s office through an unconventional no-bid process last summer, The Standard reported on some unusual circumstances of the contract, including links between company executives, the mayor, and Tipping Point Community, the nonprofit Lurie founded. 

The city’s justification for not conducting a formal bidding process was that OpenGov was the only govtech firm that could meet the deadline.

But that bet hasn’t borne out. The company was supposed to deliver 15 types of permits — from bathroom and kitchen remodels to fire alarm and sprinklers — to the new PermitSF system by March 16. Today, only seven are available online. OpenGov says the rest will be delivered by June, but a city official told The Standard not to expect everything to be completed until the end of summer. 

The city is seeking a new, $6.5 million, six-year contract with OpenGov that would lock the permitting system into the software for the foreseeable future. While the first year of the contract has faced hiccups, city officials admitted to The Standard, they claim future iterations of the software will offer more flexibility.

That hasn’t stopped some from trying to put the kibosh on the contract extension. IFPTE Local 21, the public-sector union that represents more than 13,000 city workers, claims that the software lacks critical features and isn’t being integrated properly with the city workforce.

On May 4, the Civil Service Commission, the body overseeing the approval of the contract, voted unanimously to push the renewal hearing to Monday after asserting that the city had not provided the required documentation showing union objections. The contract is also subject to the Board of Supervisors' approval.

During his 2024 campaign for mayor, Lurie promised to create 1,500 shelter beds in the first six months of his term, a signature proposal that helped propel him into City Hall. 

Almost immediately, there were signs that this would not come to fruition: In January 2025, a homelessness adviser to Lurie told The Standard that his 1,500-bed commitment was a rhetorical “slip up.” By July, as the six-month mark approached, the mayor dropped the ambitious plan and said he would instead focus on a smaller number of “the right beds,” while directing city agencies to tackle drug addiction and mental health issues. 

The promises surrounding PermitSF carry similarities to the shelter rollout. However, in this case, the city has been able to release a small, working product with OpenGov instead of scrapping the project entirely. 

When the mayor’s office was searching for software to overhaul the permitting system last summer, staffers raised concerns about OpenGov’s capabilities, saying its features had “gaps so significant” that it “shouldn’t be considered.” 

Those concerns continue, with one city worker telling The Standard the city is effectively subsidizing OpenGov’s research and development department. City staffers have created a list of more than 50 problems with the software, according to a document obtained by The Standard, including a lack of integration with the existing system and gaps in the permissions of who can edit data. 

OpenGov employees backed up the city workers’ assertions; one said the company can handle roughly 25% of what its govtech competitors can do.

All the criticism doesn’t diminish the fact that some city workers are pleased with the new OpenGov platform. The Standard spoke with two members of SF Planning who described a program that, while limited in the types of permits it can issue, has made their jobs better. 

“We do the same type of review, we do the same type of back and forth with applicants,” said staffer Dakota Spycher. “It’s just all in one system. We don’t have to write on [a] physical form. We don’t have to enter information into a system that was created in the ’90s, and we don’t have to create a new record ourselves. So it’s really streamlined.”

But there remains a wide variety of permits to transfer to the OpenGov platform. The city has hundreds of permit types, and many are much more complicated than the ones that have been modernized. Whether Lurie’s project can execute on those remains to be seen.