Across the United States, local governments struggle with a problem that rarely makes headlines but quietly imposes large costs: slow, unpredictable building permit review.

A homeowner wants to renovate a kitchen. A small business wants to open a café. An apartment building needs routine repairs. The plans are professionally drawn, code-compliant, and funded. And then the project waits—sometimes for months—not because it is unsafe, but because municipal review capacity is limited.

This is not a question of bad intentions. It is a question of administrative design.

Two Ways to Review Permits

Broadly speaking, cities use one of two models:

Model Mechanism Focus
Universal Pre-review Every plan is reviewed line-by-line by municipal staff before a permit is issued. Prevention via 100% oversight.
Professional Self-Certification Licensed architects/engineers certify code compliance; permits are issued promptly. Risk-based enforcement via targeted audits.

The second model is often misunderstood as deregulation. In practice, it is better understood as risk-based enforcement.

How Peer Cities Use Self-Certification

Self-certification is not theoretical; it is a proven tool in large, complex urban environments:

  • Phoenix: Operates a program allowing qualifying projects to receive permits in as little as 24 hours, with no evidence of increased safety violations.
  • Chicago: Pairs faster issuance for residential and commercial projects with rigorous post-issuance audits.
  • New York City: Long-standing reliance on professional certification. While audits occasionally find paperwork errors, serious life-safety violations are rare—and professionally sanctioned when they occur.

The logic is consistent: Cities do not stop checking compliance. They stop checking everything before work begins. Instead of reviewing 100% of plans slowly, they review a smaller percentage deeply.

Why This Matters for State Capacity

Permitting delays are a state-capacity signal. When routine, low-risk decisions consume scarce administrative attention, governments have less capacity to:

  1. Inspect complex, high-risk projects.
  2. Enforce existing safety violations.
  3. Respond quickly to housing or economic shocks.

Professional self-certification reallocates limited public expertise to where it has the highest marginal value.

The New York Legislative Context

A recently proposed New York State bill would authorize municipalities to adopt professional self-certification programs. The proposal is narrow, optional, and designed to preserve municipal oversight through mandatory audits.

While reviewing the bill text, I identified a technical issue: population thresholds based on outdated census figures unintentionally exclude some municipalities the bill was clearly intended to cover. This is a common failure mode in legislation—policy intent outpacing statutory housekeeping—and illustrates why administrative details matter.

What This Reveals About Local Governance

The self-certification debate highlights a larger lesson: Administrative bottlenecks are often treated as political problems when they are, in fact, design problems.

Cities that adopt risk-based permitting systems are not “cutting corners.” They are aligning incentives so that professional expertise is used efficiently. This is the same institutional logic that underlies effective financial reporting or procurement oversight: focus attention where risk is highest, not where it is easiest to apply process.

Why I’m Writing About This

I’m interested in permitting reform not as an advocate for any specific constituency, but as someone studying how local governments allocate limited administrative capacity.

Whether the subject is financial reporting, building permits, or service delivery, the pattern is consistent: well-designed institutions respect time, expertise, and accountability simultaneously. Poorly designed ones trade one off against the others.

Understanding—and documenting—those design choices is a prerequisite to improving them.