Welcome Emily, and congrats on the recent promotion! That's awesome you get to be involved with programmatic initiatives at your building department. Opportunities to make a real difference and change the system are fundamental to government work and can be such a morale booster.
This forum is definitely a great place to exchange notes with other permitting staff and gain insight into how other offices are doing things. To that end, hopefully you're able to get some helpful input in response to your post from earlier today re: OTC permitting in other jurisdictions.