This guide covers how to find a permit record in Tacoma, a city that runs its permitting through Accela Citizen Access under the name Tacoma Permits. That is a different system from Bellevue's shared MyBuildingPermit portal, built on different software, so the steps below are specific to Tacoma rather than something you can carry over from another city.
Searching for a record
Before searching, have one of these on hand. A record number works, which Tacoma often formats with letters and digits, such as a prefix like BLDCN followed by a year and a sequence number. A property address works just as well, and so does a parcel number if the search is about a lot rather than a known project. Any one of these is enough to start, and an address is the easiest starting point if a record number is not already known.
Tacoma Permits sits at tacomapermits.org, and the search and application system itself lives inside Accela Citizen Access at aca.accela.com/tacoma. The Tacoma Permits site links out to the Accela portal under "Submit/Search Permits." Once inside Accela, the search bar or the Search Permit Records function locates a record by address or record number.
When a record opens, the page starts with the record number and the record status at the top. Below that sit the location details, including the address and parcel number, and project details such as the type of work and the estimated job value. Further down are several tabs, processing status, related records, attachments, inspections, and fees. The processing status tab is the one to check for the exact step a permit is on, since the record status field alone shows the overall state but not which individual task is active.
What a record status means
A permit's record status moves through a small set of values as it goes through the city. Application means the record has been submitted and is waiting on intake or review. Under review means staff are checking the plans against code. Issued means the permit has cleared review and construction can start. Finalized means every required inspection has been completed and the permit is closed out. A record can also sit in a withdrawn or expired state if the applicant never completed the process. Inside a record, individual review and inspection tasks each carry their own marker showing whether that specific task is still active or has been completed, separate from the overall record status.
How the same permits show up on BuildVue
Finding every permit tied to one Tacoma address in Accela means running several separate searches and comparing record numbers by hand, since a land use permit, a demolition permit, and a building permit for the same project rarely share one ID. BuildVue's Tacoma page does that matching automatically, combining every permit at an address into one project and assigning it a stage, Design Review, Land Use, Construction, or Complete, based on where its permits stand. A timeline on each project lines up the application, issue, and completion dates from every permit involved.
On the map, Tacoma currently shows around 90 tracked projects, with residential unit counts and construction value broken out both citywide and by neighborhood. Filtering by stage or project type on the interactive map saves opening one Accela record at a time.