In the final piece of the three-part review of recent energy legislation, we will now be discussing the idea of a permitting dashboard. While less exciting on paper, permitting dashboards can unlock paper jams and jumpstart opportunity for Wisconsin.
Permitting Delays Are Costly
With every delay comes a cost. In some areas of the state, building permits can take over a year to receive. That’s a year of inflation, cost increases, and supply chain issues to navigate. For energy projects, this means less energy available. This cost is passed onto the end user to recuperate costs and time loss.
The Process Is Slow & Challenging
Just like getting a permit to build a home or a shed, you never really know where your application is in the process and where it may be held up. For large energy projects, developers aren’t even sure who to contact for status updates or how to plan extremely large capital allocations.
Transparency And Streamlining
Projects deserve transparency where all stakeholders can access the status of their application and provide more information or prepare to build. Dashboards have demonstrated extreme efficiency improvements with no regulatory changes.
States are beginning to understand that processes have become overly bureaucratic and cumbersome for users. Every day lost is a day wasted. This legislation would create a public-facing permitting dashboard that displays the status of every application, where it is in the process, who is responsible, and what the application is for.
This bill does not reform any existing regulations or standards. It may sound simple and unnecessary to create a dashboard for such processes, but the results are staggering. In Virginia, former Governor Youngkin, a Republican, created Permitting Enhancement and Evaluation Platform (PEEP). Virginia’s permitting process has now experienced upwards of 70% in processing time reductions. Simply utilizing technology and transparency, with no other changes, sped up project approvals. This was a remarkably simple but effective initiative.
Newly elected governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherill, a Democrat, agreed. The New Jersey Innovation Authority joined the dashboard trend. New Jersey’s new permitting dashboard will allow users to track their application process while also helping state agencies identify bottlenecks and redundancy.
Virginia and New Jersey demonstrate that permitting efficiency is not partisan but common sense. There is no discrimination against the energy source, project type, or location. Just transparency and efficiency to ensure they deploy new projects quickly, efficiently, and for less cost than if the project was needlessly delayed.
This type of legislation would be beneficial for Wisconsin. NPN would like to see it go a step further to include not just energy projects but all permitting types. Building a home, apartment building, new business, new road, and everything in between should be as efficient and quick as possible.
This process also allows the builders and contractors to better plan for their year, knowing exactly how many to hire, when to schedule their work, and to invest in job training. By reducing timelines, the state can play a large role in reducing uncertainty and needless costs.
