City officials said in a Federal Court lawsuit that the city is being damaged by being unable to review historical data in order to make decisions on millions of dollars in projects on new building permit requests.
The city is suing Accela, a California company.
Beginning in approximately 2000, the city and Accela entered into a series of contracts in which Accela provided the city with a software solution to manage, track and store its permit records.
In May 2016, the city and Accela entered into an agreement which migrated the city of Chattanooga’s records onto a cloud based platform hosted by Accela.
The city and Accela renewed the agreement for cloud based services until 2020 when the city elected to change to a different service provider.
The city claims Accela was obligated to maintain the records of the city and to provide a copy of those records to the city. The city said it has made multiple request to Accela for a copy of the city’s records, but it cannot get access.
The city has paid over $75,000.00 in fees over the life of the agreement "on the assurance that its records would be safely stored and accessible by the city," it was stated.