Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting said new digital and AI tools will help attack the backlog of residential and commercial building permit applications, but under the new system, the backlog has appeared to grow.
The City and County of Honolulu adopted the platform HNL Build last year to streamline permitting processes. Since its launch, the number of building permit applications has increased by 34%.
Starting this month, applicants for residential permits will be required to use a new platform called CivCheck, which DPP has been using for about a year. Advocates say this could cut the permit application process time by up to 70%.
Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, the director of DPP, said early data on CivCheck and HNL Build show promising results.
“Does it actually work? Our early results say yes. Review cycles are down 58%, corrections are down 67%, review time is down 55%, and we're seeing an average of 40.5 review days saved. If we can improve the quality of the application before it enters the government review, we can eliminate entire cycles of correction. That's potentially much more powerful than asking every reviewer to work a little faster.”
But despite Apuna’s latest update to the Honolulu City Council, the backlog of permits seems to persist, currently standing at 9,252.
“The backlog is applications in minus applications out,” said Councilmember Tyler Dos Santos-Tam. “(This) indicates that the number of applications submitted is up 34%, but the number of building permits issued is only up 5%. So that would imply that the backlog is actually growing.”
DPP said it’s important to note this number encompasses all permits in the system, including those that are mid-edits, waiting for applicant revisions, already in issuance, and those that are “legacy permits” that are dormant and have been in the system since before it was digitized. Apuna stated that the department is trying to monitor which are active and need to be addressed versus those that have been abandoned or inactive, as more than 2,000 have been sitting idle for more than a year.
Residential permits issued in 2026 spent an average of 218 days from application to issuance, while commercial permits averaged 469 days.
