“Under Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia created a new permitting dashboard, and cut permit processing times by 72%. The state’s attracted $125 billion in capital investment since 2022. Conservative abundance at work,” notes Russ Greene of Stand Together. The National Review adds that under Youngkin, Virginia “occupational license approval times declined from 33 days to 5 days. Stormwater permitting reforms saved $124 million.” And “Department of Environmental Quality permit processing times declined by 70%.”
When people don’t have an occupational license due to bureaucratic delays, they can’t work or support their families. Their lack of employment reduces the income tax revenue that pays for schools, roads, and law enforcement. So speeding up licensing and permitting, as Youngkin has done, is very important.
Governor Youngkin’s regulatory reforms have saved Virginians $1.2 billion per year, and cut the cost of building a home by $24,000 on average, by eliminating obsolete regulations not required by Virginia law. “Since 2022, Virginia has reduced the number of requirements in its regulatory code by 26.8 percent, exceeding Youngkin’s goal of 25 percent. He says his administration is on pace to reach a 33 percent reduction by the end of his term early next year. The reduction in regulatory word count is even greater: 11.5 million words were struck, nearly half of the total found in state guidance documents,” the National Review says.
The Virginia Chamber of Commerce adds:
Running a business requires careful planning, and it’s impossible to plan if good information isn’t readily available.
One area that has traditionally been very non-transparent is the permitting process. Businesses require a wide variety of permits to operate, but permit applications often seem to sit in a black box for months or even years on end. Meanwhile, potential business is lost, and would-be entrepreneurs have no idea whether or when they’ll be able to open up shop.
Governor Glenn Youngkin has made it a top priority to change that dynamic. From day one, his focus has been making Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family. A major part of that mission is ensuring that both businesses and citizens can quickly obtain the permits they need and can easily track ongoing permit applications.
Early in 2022, the Director of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), Mike Rolband, undertook an innovative new approach to achieving the Governor’s permitting reform goals. He began developing an online dashboard called the “Permitting Enhancement and Evaluation Platform,” or “PEEP” for short, that is designed to show every permit application that DEQ considers. For each of DEQ’s permits, PEEP…showed how long each step was supposed to take and how long each step was actually taking. This transparency served two important goals.
First, it made the whole process completely transparent for the public….if there was a delay, users could also see who was responsible….
Second, the added transparency provided an invaluable management tool for DEQ. As the agency found, some offices were taking much longer than others to review permits. Using data from PEEP, DEQ management was able to determine that some regional offices were overloaded and other offices had the capacity to assist their coworkers. PEEP also included specific permit application requirement checklists to improve communication of existing requirements and specify who is responsible for each step in the schedule. By making these changes, DEQ was able to maintain a more reasonable workload allocation throughout the agency. As a result, DEQ has been able to cut permit processing time by 72%.
