Mayor Donna Deegan is keeping her promise to speed up permitting, which is vital to lowering the cost of residential and commercial building.

The evidence for this can be seen on the Mayor’s Dashboards at the local government website – another thing for which Deegan deserves credit.

In theory, someone who wanted to build something could go to City Hall, turn over documentation and have a permit in hand six hours later.

In reality, it has taken days, weeks and perhaps even months in the past.

Delay can be both bureaucratic and due to failure of the applicant to submit documentation correctly.

Following complaints, Deegan in January pledged to improve the process.

On the Permitting Dashboard it shows that it took 11 days on average to issue a permit in January. By July, that was down to 7 days.

The Dashboard also shows how much of the delay is caused by the applicant and how much by the city. Currently it is split about evenly.

Finally, there is the matter of the backlog of permits. Josh Gideon, chief of the building division, told Eye on Jacksonville that after they began focusing on the backlog, it was reduced from 30 percent to zero, as of this week.

The administration also is trying to bring all permitting under a single umbrella called JAXEPICS, providing builders and homeowners with a single point of access concerning the status of their permit application.

Permits have an impact on many local issues, including affordable housing, which Deegan also has made a priority – to the extent that government can have an effect.

For the year, the value of projects requiring city permits exceeds $5 billion, so we are not talking about chicken feed.

Deegan’s Dashboards provide useful information about a number of city functions, presented with graphs and charts and her office said they intend to increase the number and types of information.

This is a vast improvement over the anal retentive Lenny Curry, who preceded Deegan and sought to control all information emanating from City Hall.