Minnesota: 60-day permitting decisions

Why can't we do this?

A Permit Process Should Never Take a Year. Here's a Different Way. Charles Marohn, Strong Towns, April 2019.

I’ve run this by people who work in local government in California, Florida, and elsewhere, and it often freaks them out. How can we make a decision in sixty days? I find this reaction baffling.

Why would you not want to make a decision within sixty days? What benefit is there to the community for having a review process that takes longer than that? What are you doing that takes so long? Does it add enough value to justify the harm of such a long and arbitrary process?

Minnesota is far from perfect on these things, but this process has created some good habits that I struggle to find in other places:

First, the 60-day time limit means we must have codes and processes that are reasonably coherent; otherwise we’ll struggle to meet the time limit. There is no forwarding things to thirty different departments for their comment whenever they get to it. It won’t work that way, so we don’t allow it to. If we don’t want to be run over, we must put practices in place to be competent at what we do.

The process also forces us to make decisions that are reasonably defensible. The act of having to write down why a decision has been made—and reference the exact code in doing so—forces a discipline on the entire process that reduces arbitrary decisions. None of this is to suggest that Minnesota cities never make a bad call—of course they do—but simply that there are good mechanisms in place to correct them and to encourage learning from mistakes.

Finally, this process is how we show respect to each other. If we want people to invest in our communities, we must be clear about what we want and have a discernible and reliable process to accomplish that. If we want people to have faith in our local government, we must be transparent in our actions and predictable in our outcomes. To me, anything else seems like a failure.

More

• The MacPhail Report recommended setting time limits on approvals.

• Guaranteed approval timelines in Surrey.