Case Study: Deschutes County achieves scalable, efficient permitting and inspection operations with Accela

Deschutes County Tackles Explosive Growth with Cloud Technology

Deschutes County, Oregon — a rapidly growing region of about 187,621 people that includes Bend, Redmond, Sisters and La Pine — faced surging demand for planning and building services and was hampered by an aging, homegrown IBM PICK system that required paper forms, manual data entry and dwindling IT support. To manage projected growth and improve citizen service, the county needed a modern, scalable solution to automate permitting, inspections and land‑use workflows.

The county implemented Accela’s cloud SaaS suite (Building, Planning, Code Enforcement, Mobile and Citizen Access) on Microsoft Azure, enabling online submissions, payments, mobile inspections and real‑time reporting via Power BI. With 55 Accela users, Deschutes now processes ~6,500 permits and 48,000 inspections annually plus ~900 land‑use applications, tracks processing times with dashboards, serves more customers with fewer resources, reduces office foot traffic and improves inspector productivity and transparency for residents and contractors.

Deschutes County

Jon Skidmore

Bend Assistant City Manager