Goodhue County land management director outlines online permitting rollout, budget and fee changes

Megan Smith, the county's land management director, briefed the Goodhue County Board at a Committee of the Whole meeting on the building division's staffing, finances and a newly awarded online permitting contract.

Smith said the division comprises four positions (building official, building inspector, building technician supervisor and building technician), a shared administrative assistant, three fleet vehicles and that county staff issued just over 800 permits in 2025 with about $37 million in valuation. "For those of you that know me, my name is Megan Smith. I'm the land management director here for Goodhue County," she said at the start of the presentation.

The county budgeted $18,000 to solicit online-permitting proposals and signed a contract with a vendor identified in the presentation as Gov; Smith said the implementation contract totaled $15,600 and includes GIS integration so users can enter an address, retrieve a parcel and have the parcel data linked automatically to the permit record. Smith said staff hope the new platform will go live in mid-2026 and that it will consolidate applications for building, well, septic, conditional-use, variance and other land-use permits into a single database with online payment capability.

Smith walked the board through a 10-year snapshot of revenues and expenses, noting permit revenue is cyclical and driven by local construction activity; she said building-permit revenue rose to roughly $500,000 in 2021 and fell to about $360,000 in 2025, while division expenses moved from roughly $504,000 (2021) to $596,000 (2025). She said American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars in 2022 23 helped offset salary costs and that a 2025 payroll coding error assigned her entire salary to the building fund rather than splitting it across land-use divisions, which inflated the 2025 building-fund figures.

On fees, Smith explained the customer cost for a permit comprises three parts: the valuation-based permit fee, a plan-review fee (a percentage of the permit fee) and a state search charge remitted to the state. Using a $125,000 accessory building example, she showed a $1,884 customer cost that included the permit fee, plan-review charge and the state search fee. Smith said the county raised the residential plan-review percentage from 45% to 65% when updating the fee schedule to better align with regional practice after research showed the county had been undercharging.

Board members asked whether private inspection providers charge more and whether the county is "leaving money on the table" by keeping inspections in-house. Smith said she had not completed a deep comparative analysis of other jurisdictions' total customer charges but noted some cities contracted with private firms in part because those firms already offered online permitting. Smith and other participants also cautioned that certain functions (notably septic and well programs) are state-required and that, even if inspections are contracted, legal responsibility for enforcement ultimately remains with the county.

Several commissioners raised budget concerns. One highlighted that the department often comes in under budget and that the land-use department's combined budget (including well and septic) had a total cost of roughly $488,000 in the presenter's summary, but other commissioners warned that preliminary 2027 budget requests could amount to a roughly 20% levy increase and urged the board to explore where savings could be found across multiple departments before approving large levy increases.

Smith described the county's city-contract model (an 80/20 split where the city keeps 20% of the permit fee while the county retains 80% of the fee and 100% of plan-review revenue, the state receiving the statutorily required search charge) and used Canon Falls's recent subdivision and development as an example that temporarily boosted county revenues in 2025.

Smith closed by showing adoption-mapping from the Builders Association of Minnesota and said state policy and regional trends point toward broader countywide adoption of the state building code; she argued the county model creates consistency across jurisdictions and better protects the public by keeping zoning, building and well/septic continuity intact. The board agreed to consider the financial implications and next steps in future meetings; the session paused for a five-minute break.

The board did not take any formal vote during this presentation; members asked staff for follow-up information about comparable private-provider fees and more granular fee-schedule comparisons for towns that currently contract out inspections.