Permitting reforms in Virginia can inspire greater efficiency and transparency in other jurisdictions.
Those of us who grew up in the pre-smartphone era still remember a time when placing an order meant waiting for who-knows-how-long before it arrived. These days, whether you are receiving a FedEx delivery, waiting on an Uber, or just ordering a pizza, you can usually track the anticipated arrival down to the minute.
But in the realm of government services, we are mostly still living “like it’s 1999”—and not in the fun, nostalgic way. If you are waiting for a passport, the fact that you have little to no idea when it will arrive can be annoying. If you are waiting on a professional license or building permit, the uncertainty can be more than annoying: It can cost you thousands of dollars and, in some cases, make the difference between whether your business succeeds or fails.
When former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin came into office in 2022, he made fixing this problem one of his primary goals. He issued an executive order calling for a “substantial shortening” of permit processing times. He also launched a pilot program at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality that would allow the public to track environmental permits online, exactly as they can track FedEx packages and pizzas.
Three years later, these efforts have been resoundingly successful. The Department of Environmental Quality pilot has resulted in a 65 percent reduction in that agency’s permit processing time. Based on this success, Virginia expanded the pilot to include nine additional agencies. The statewide dashboard, which is known as Virginia Permit Transparency (VPT), includes tens of thousands of applications per year. It has won prestigious awards and has been widely praised for bringing an unprecedented level of transparency to the permitting process.
Building on these achievements, Governor Youngkin issued another executive order designed to continue streamlining the state permitting process. As a result, Virginia agencies have further reduced processing times, eliminated unnecessary permits, simplified existing permits, and expanded opportunities to apply for permits online. The American Legislative Exchange Council issued a model bill based on Governor Youngkin’s executive order that other states can use to replicate these reforms.
In short, Virginia is rapidly becoming the nationwide model for permitting reform, much as it has become a model for regulatory modernization.
But a state looking to replicate Virginia’s success is likely to have a lot of questions: How much does it cost? How much staff time is required? Is a technological overhaul needed, especially if some permits are still paper-based? What sort of management structure is needed to make a statewide dashboard work?
Fortunately, states grappling with these questions now have plenty of resources to help them find answers. VPT itself was intentionally designed with a simple user interface that any state could replicate. And a legislator looking to reproduce Virginia’s model could introduce legislation based on the American Legislative Exchange Council model bill.
For more detailed inquiries, states can also now look to two independent reports published by highly regarded think tanks. The first is a 50-page how-to guide produced by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Recoding America Fund. It provides a step-by-step breakdown of the process of launching a VPT-inspired permitting dashboard. Among its many insights, it encourages states to first test the model by running a pilot program, much as Virginia did with the Department of Environmental Quality. The guide also offers a wealth of information on the key issues states are likely to grapple with, including how much it costs to build a dashboard and how to staff the design and implementation phases.
A second report from the Environmental Policy Innovation Center also provides critical insights on how states can replicate Virginia’s success. Like the guide, it urges reform-minded states to start small with a pilot, building up to a statewide dashboard. The Environmental Policy Innovation guide also outlines how states can create the management infrastructure needed to ensure the project succeeds, pointing to the importance of providing centralized oversight of any permit reform project.
As states will learn from reading these guides, achieving meaningful and sustainable permitting reform is a lot easier and cheaper than one might think. These are some of the key takeaways:
- Building a comprehensive permitting dashboard is not cost-free, but it involves relatively modest outside consulting fees and internal staff time.
- Creating a statewide dashboard also requires some level of reallocation of staff resources, but the time required is modest. VPT was built in roughly a year and did not require hiring any additional agency staff.
- The investment on the front end pays dividends on the back end. VPT agencies have seen a significant reduction in calls from applicants—and can answer questions they receive more quickly by pointing the caller to VPT.
- A permitting dashboard does not require standardization of permitting procedures: VPT includes a handful of paper-based permits that are tracked in spreadsheets.
- Assigning a single office to oversee the development and ongoing maintenance of a project such as VPT helps ensure that everyone is steering in the right direction.
In addition, as the Virginia experience has shown, creating a transparent permitting process opens the door to a wide variety of additional reforms. Once performance information is public, review times naturally go down: At least five agencies have seen at least a 20 percent improvement in processing time since having their permits appear online. And mapping out the permit process reveals what steps may be unnecessary or what permits might be eliminated entirely.
VPT has also proven to be a valuable management tool. If a particular employee or division is underperforming, the agency can provide targeted coaching. If one part of the agency is overburdened, work can be reallocated, and the data produced by VPT can help identify bottlenecks. Oftentimes, the agency issuing the permit is not responsible for delays. A federal agency, a local government, or even the applicant, or, more likely, the contractor the applicant hired, is often the source of a holdup. Armed with data from VPT, Virginia agencies can work with their partners to promote improvement across the board.
In a few short years, using smartphones to track delivery of basic goods and services has gone from revolutionary to routine. Virginia’s hope is that VPT will do the same for governmentally issued permits and licenses. Other states are already looking to replicate the Virginia model, and federal agencies are exploring similar reforms, including through a project recently launched at the Administrative Conference of the United States.
As these efforts get underway, permit applicants may eventually be able to access a single portal that allows them to track applications across the federal, state, and local levels. Better still, artificial intelligence chatbots may help applicants track what permits they need for specific projects.
Technology has upended virtually every sector of the modern economy. Government agencies will fall further and further behind their private sector counterparts if they do not take advantage of modern innovations. Virginia has led the way in bringing government services into the 21st century, blazing a trail for reform-minded peers to follow.
