Perinton, New York is Setting a New Standard for Permitting

About Perinton

Perinton, New York sits just east of Rochester. It was founded in 1812 along the Erie Canal that runs through it and helped spur the community's initial growth. The canal still draws people to the town, with the Erie Canalway trail attracting cyclists from across the state. Today the town covers 34 square miles around the Village of Fairport and is home to 18,000 households.

Every permit, complaint, and inspection across those 34 square miles runs through a nine-person department, led by Director of Building and Codes Greg Seigfred. Together, they issue about 1,000 building permits a year, investigate roughly 200 property maintenance and zoning complaints, and inspect about 180 properties for fire safety.

Seigfred has lived in Perinton his whole life. At 18 he joined the Fairport volunteer fire department, following his father, and his brother and brother-in-law are still members 25 years later. Hired as assistant building inspector in 2004, he became fire marshal and has run the department since 2019. The owner of the pizza shop he worked at as a teenager now comes into his office for building permits. "I have a huge sense of hometown pride," he says.

The problem

Before GovWell, getting a permitting question answered in Perinton often meant coming directly to the counter. "Homeowners, especially, don't have experience with building permits the way contractors do," Seigfred says. Residents couldn't find what they needed on the town website, so they called or drove over. And they came when they could, which was mostly at the end of the week. "We used to have a Friday afternoon rush every week," Seigfred says. "Homeowners struggled to visit during business hours.”

That shaped how the department spent its time. "If somebody walks into our office for whatever purpose, that person instantly becomes the first priority," Seigfred says. "Whatever our staff is working on, they're going to stop what they're doing. They're going to walk to the front counter and take care of their needs." Perinton's nine-person team was answering the same questions in person, one at a time, at the expense of plan reviews and inspections. This was suboptimal for everyone involved: residents and contractors had to come in person during the day for answers and every interruption pushed the review queue back for staff.

None of this was a staffing problem. Perinton's team was doing exactly what good public servants do: dropping their work to help whoever walked through the door. What they didn't have was software built for modern service delivery. Perinton had been on the same system for about 20 years, from a time when coming to the counter was the only option.

The opportunity

Seigfred spent about six months demoing various software systems. GovWell was smaller than the alternatives at the time, but he chose it anyway. "The user interface, the appearance of the system, and how the workflows were managed, how simple and intuitive it was, it kind of set the bar," he says. "We didn't even know we were looking for it until we saw it.”

The department went live on GovWell in December 2024. Nearly 52,000 historical records came across in the migration, leaving two decades of permit history intact. Getting to those records used to mean a trip to the filing cabinet: inspectors pulled paper plans each morning and refiled them each night. Now every inspector carries a tablet with every plan and record in the town on it. "I always say if it's not in GovWell it didn't happen," Seigfred says. "We don't maintain spreadsheets or lists or anything like that.”

That same system is what answers Perinton's residents and contractors today. "When we signed on with GovWell in 2024, AI was not a discussion point in any of the permitting softwares that were out there," Seigfred says. But GovWell was already building it. The AI Community Assistant is trained on Perinton's local codes, forms, and requirements and answers in more than 80 languages. Seigfred rolled it out inside the department first, then on the building and codes page, and then across the entire town website. He stays in the loop on all of it. He can read every conversation with the Assistant to make adjustments and improvements, and questions that need judgment route to a person. The community now uses it to ask about recreation programs and events as well as permits.

The result

The Friday afternoon rush is gone for Perinton's Building and Codes Department. The AI Community Assistant has answered thousands of resident questions since it launched, 86% of them resolved automatically with no staff involvement. And a third of them arrived outside business hours. "Our office is only open nine to five during the week," Seigfred says. "The AI assistant is available 24/7.”

It handles exactly what used to bring people to the counter. "It's doing a really good job directing people around the website and answering simple questions that otherwise would have been a phone call," Seigfred says. A homeowner asking whether a shed needs a permit gets a direct link to the right application in seconds, and a staff member doesn't have to leave their desk to explain it.

Both sides of the counter got something back. Residents and contractors can now handle permitting on their own schedule instead of the town's. Inspectors and staff work through plan reviews and inspections without stopping to answer questions at the counter.

Permits move faster too. Median time from application to issued permit is down 35% from where it was the year before they switched.

The software is only part of it. Twenty months in, Seigfred knows the GovWell team by name, and his staff can reach a live person whenever they need one. "Instead of having one dedicated person in the town that you have to go through to get all your GovWell needs addressed, they know that they can reach out directly to GovWell," he says, "and they don't have to come find me or get delayed in any way.”

For Seigfred, success was always about creating a better public experience. He knows what most people expect when they hear they need a building permit. "It's always this assumption like, oh great, now I have to get into the bureaucracy. I'm going to be delayed," he says. "We just want to avoid that. We want to be the exact opposite.”

In Perinton, the Building and Codes Department already is. The 47,000-person town has a modern government that answers questions at any hour, keeps decades of permit history at every inspector's fingertips, and supports the growth of the community.