There's just one problem: the software they hired to do it was apparently a mess from day one.

OpenGov, the company tapped to overhaul the city's permitting technology, reportedly knew it would miss its own deadlines — and plowed ahead anyway. Former employees say the warning signs were there early, that the project was troubled well before anyone at City Hall started cutting ribbons. Meanwhile, current city workers say the software is missing critical features they actually need to, you know, process permits.

This is a painfully familiar pattern in San Francisco governance. Step one: identify a real problem everyone agrees on. Step two: announce a bold, expensive solution with great fanfare. Step three: hand millions in taxpayer dollars to a vendor. Step four: discover the vendor can't deliver. Step five: shrug.

The permitting crisis isn't abstract. It costs real people real money. Every month a project sits in bureaucratic limbo is another month of carrying costs for a small business owner, another month of delayed housing in a city that desperately needs it. When the fix for the problem is itself broken, you've compounded the failure.

The real question now is accountability. Did the city do proper due diligence before awarding this contract? Were there performance benchmarks with teeth? Or was this another case of San Francisco's government treating procurement like a vibes-based exercise?

Lurie deserves some credit for prioritizing the right issue. But good intentions don't process building permits. Results do. And right now, the city is paying for software that doesn't work to fix a system that still doesn't work. That's not reform — that's just spending money with extra steps.