A new team inside city hall is working to streamline operations and improve efficiency within the city of Cape Coral’s internal processes, aiming to deliver faster, smarter services to residents.
City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn announced the creation of the Bureau of Transformative Change (BTC ). It's a cross-departmental group focused on streamlining city services and eliminating waste.
“If it doesn’t add value, we don’t want to do it,” Ilczyszyn said. “We've been making incremental change. This is going to be transformative. We are going to utilize the knowledge of our employees, empower them to challenge everything they do in order to deliver a better value and a better service, more efficiently for our community."
The initiative will use “Lean Kaizen” principles, a strategy focused on continuous improvement. The city is expected to partner with LeanBreakThru Consulting Group to guide the launch. A contract with the group is on Wednesday's city council consent agenda.
The BTC’s first targets include high-impact service areas like business permitting, city procurement, and maintenance, areas many business owners say need improvement.
Sean Stephens, who runs a landscaping company in Cape Coral, says navigating the city’s permitting process can be time-consuming.
“It’s very frustrating to pull permits because they take so long,” Stephens said. "So this is a good step moving forward with the Cape."
Ilczyszyn says frontline employees often see inefficiencies firsthand, and the BTC will give them the tools and support to solve problems at the source.
“Ultimately, the goal is that our employees are just doing this routinely throughout their day,” he said. “Ask the question, ‘Why am I doing this? Is it adding value?’ If it’s not, recommend to your manager that we don’t need to do it anymore.”
Richard Metzger, another local business owner, says he supports the idea of stepping back and rethinking government operations.
“Whether it’s government or even private business or schools — take a step back and look at what you’re doing,” he said.
City officials say they will report regularly on BTC’s progress and provide quarterly updates to the city council on cost savings and performance improvements.
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