Chesterfield County’s Pending Cases Application, a web-based tool for tracking land-use cases, has seen increased community engagement and received recognition from outside organizations more than a year after its launch.
In August, the application received a 2025 Virginia Association of Counties (VACo) Achievement Award. This annual award recognizes programs that address community needs and improve government services. Last month, Chesterfield also earned a Commonwealth Technology Award for Achievement in Innovation for the application, which was developed through collaboration between the county’s Information Systems Technology (IST) and Planning departments.
Lauren Henry, the lead developer in IST and project manager, stated, “It’s a technology innovation, but it couldn’t have been done without the subject matter experts in Planning – they’re the ones who obviously best know their data and specific cues their audience was already accustomed to as projects work their way through the county’s zoning process.”
The application provides information on active development cases by pulling data from the county’s Enterprise Land Management (ELM) community development portal. It covers more than 460 pending cases and about 70 recently completed cases, with data refreshed daily. Users can filter cases by several criteria and view information in both text listings and on an interactive map.
Since its launch in March 2024, the application has logged over 55,000 pageviews and 128,500 unique interactions, averaging about 320 interactions each day.
Stephen Donohoe, assistant director in Planning, said, “We’ve gotten nothing but good feedback from the community on this. It’s designed to be highly transparent for the citizens of Chesterfield to be able to learn about and track a case from time of acceptance, through correspondence between the applicant and staff, for every review up to the point the Board of Supervisors takes action on it.”
The tool has also helped reduce costs for the county by automating tasks that were previously handled manually.
In December 2023, as part of preparations for a new county website, IST audited content on chesterfield.gov and found that information about development projects was scattered across three different systems: the ELM data portal, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for mapping, and individual project pages built by staff. This setup was inefficient for both users and staff. In response, IST and Planning staff developed the Pending Cases Application, launching its first version in March 2024 with automated data retrieval from ELM.
Between March and July, IST improved the user experience based on feedback, and a more comprehensive version went live in August 2024.
Scott Garner, an application development engineer in IST, said, “User friendly is always the name of the game. We put a lot of careful thought into this because we only wanted to include as much information as made sense – if you overwhelm and confuse the user, you’re really just defeating your purpose.
“To the credit of Planning, when we approached them with Version 2, which was a fairly dramatic change from what they were used to, they fully embraced it,” he added.
The application allows residents to track zoning cases without needing to contact or visit the Planning Department during business hours.
Henry noted, “That’s the goal of what we do here – we try to make the world a little bit better for everybody, however we can. Some days it’s small things. When we launched this, it was a big victory.”
Donohoe said about 95% of users find what they need on the project pages, and for those seeking more detail, links to all ELM documents are available.
“The last thing we want to do is bring forward a case our citizens are unaware of,” he added. “Staff, the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors are all very much interested in getting the community’s input. We want an informed public when we’re holding public hearings on proposed development projects.”
