Every county highway district runs on paperwork. Permits, impact fee assessments, driveway approaches, records requests. At Ada County Highway District (ACHD), which manages more than 5,000 lane miles across Ada County, Idaho, that paperwork used to mean stacks of handwritten forms, missing attachments, and staff chasing down applicants for information that should have been there in the first place.
Today, ACHD’s Development Services and Legal teams run on something different: intuitive digital forms, automated routing, and a records request system that catches problems before they become missed deadlines. The transformation reaches across departments, and it started with a simple question. What if the forms did the work instead of the people?
Daily Detour: Paper Doesn't Scale
Before automation, the department relied on handwritten forms, Word documents, and PDFs to process everything from permit applications to impact fee appeals. The problems compounded quickly. Handwriting caused readability issues that led to data entry errors. Incomplete applications were routinely missing required attachments, forcing staff to track down applicants manually. Status updates lived in inboxes and spreadsheets rather than any centralized system, making it difficult to stay ahead of compliance timelines.
The result was friction on both sides of the counter. Staff absorbed the administrative burden of chasing paperwork, and developers and contractors experienced delays that had nothing to do with the merits of their applications and everything to do with a process that couldn’t keep up with the volume moving through it.
The Legal team faced a parallel challenge with public records requests. Requests were sometimes misrouted to the wrong department, and by the time the error surfaced, the clock on a response deadline was already running short. Idaho’s differing timelines for resident and non-resident requesters added another layer of complexity that a manual process struggled to track consistently.
The Game Changer: Forms That Work as Hard as the Team Does
Under the direction of Misty Perry, ACHD’s Information Records Administrator, the District turned to Laserfiche to rebuild its intake processes from the ground up. What began years earlier as a simple filing system evolved into a full records management platform, now supporting more than 60 forms and integrations with Zendesk, TRAKiT, ViewPoint, and JustFOIA.
For Development Services, that meant converting core processes, including the District’s largest and most complex form, the six-type permit application, into structured Laserfiche forms with logic-based questions that prevent premature or incomplete submissions. Typed responses replaced handwritten entries. Required fields and conditional rules closed the gaps that used to slip through, such as automatically requiring a Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan attachment whenever an excavation exceeds 50 feet. Submissions now route and track automatically, giving both staff and applicants real-time visibility into where a request stands.
The rebuild extended across the department’s full range of processes, including driveway approach requests, impact fee assessments and appeals, plan submittal checklists, snow removal permits, and environmental dewatering permits. Every form carries consistent ACHD branding, reinforcing a professional, trustworthy experience for the contractors and developers who use it.
On the records side, JustFOIA now works in tandem with Laserfiche to close the gaps that used to cause missed deadlines. Automated reminders notify staff when a request may belong to a different department, so reassignment happens early instead of on day nine of a response window. Separate resident and non-resident request forms account for Idaho’s differing statutory timelines, and staff can pull supporting documents directly from the Laserfiche repository without ever leaving the JustFOIA workflow.
The Results: Measurable Impact at Scale
The numbers tell the story of adoption at scale. Since launching in March 2025, ACHD has processed more than 5,700 permit applications through its new digital forms. On the records side, the District processed 688 public records requests between January 2025 and June 2026, all tracked with the transparency and accountability that manual spreadsheets never delivered.
Beyond the volume, ACHD’s teams report real operational gains: fewer follow-up emails and phone calls, faster turnaround times, and a level of cross-departmental collaboration that continues to drive new improvements. The impact didn’t go unnoticed outside the District either. ACHD’s Development Services team earned CentralSquare’s 2026 ENGAGE Smart Community Award, recognized for automating critical permitting and impact-fee processes in a way that eliminated incomplete submissions, safeguarded infrastructure funding, and improved the experience for staff and developers alike.
Project ROI
Volume handled without added headcount
Fewer incomplete impact fee submissions.
Time reclaimed from follow-up work
2026 CentralSquare ENGAGE Smart Community Award
Other Spotlights
What's Next: Extending the Model
ACHD isn’t stopping at forms. The District’s IT team is now building on the Laserfiche API to power an internal intranet consolidation application, giving staff a single, simplified interface to access repository records and internal resources without navigating multiple systems. It’s a natural next step for an organization that has already proven what happens when manual processes give way to connected, automated ones.
Build Together, Build Smart
ACHD’s digital transformation didn’t happen because paper forms were replaced with PDFs. It happened because Development Services and Legal partnered with IT to rethink how information should move through the organization, and because Laserfiche and JustFOIA gave them the platform to do it. For counties and municipalities still relying on paper-based intake, ACHD’s results offer a clear starting point: pick the process causing the most friction, automate the rules that used to require manual follow-up, and let the data show the impact.
If your organization is ready to move past paper, MCCi can help you map the same path ACHD took, from first digital form to full-scale transformation.