Gov. Josh Shapiro has made workforce and economic development a centerpiece of his administration. Recent reforms have included speeding up, and defining maximum wait times for, licensing for professionals and businesses, and offering a money-back guarantee for applicants who experience delays. These reforms have been successful at cutting wait times for licensed nurses, barbers, and even milk inspectors (which is a real job whose license turnaround has been cut by 80% following Shapiro’s reforms, according to the administration).
But the Shapiro administration’s licensing updates are now expanding to tackle the bureaucracy surrounding massive development projects. The executive order for the new Fast Track program, signed on Nov. 19, will deploy the state’s new Office of Transformation and Opportunity to coordinate licensing among state agencies including the Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). These agencies oversee important permitting concerning access to state roadways, managing industrial wastewater, monitoring air quality and so on.
Permitting delays may seem like the very definition of unavoidable bureaucratic red tape, but for companies looking to invest in Pennsylvania communities, those delays mean unpredictable expenses that make the state less desirable as a place to do business. This is multiplied when a development is unusually ambitious, when the interactions among licenses and permits become complicated and delays can pile up for months or even years.
These state permits are essential to protecting communities and the environment from unsafe or unscrupulous practices, but simply taking longer doesn’t mean the process is more robust. In fact, often it’s the opposite: An inefficient permitting process is also often an ineffective one, focused more on bureaucratic busywork than actually protecting Pennsylvania residents and landscapes.
The Fast Track program, which launched using three pilot developments, already has a slick dashboard that displays the multiple, and often simultaneous, permitting timelines that each development must reach, with horizons stretching several years into the future. Each license includes a drop-down menu of different permitting stages, including important hurdles like public comment periods or traffic impact studies.
The pilot projects for the Fast Track program demonstrate just how powerful it can be. The biggest is the Bellwether District, a 1,300-acre site along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia to be redeveloped for new industrial uses. It’s a project so big it encompasses literally 2% of the city’s footprint, and the kind of development that will require innumerable permits at various levels of government. If the state’s Fast Track program works here, it can work anywhere.
The other two projects represent more rural Fast Track initiatives that demonstrate the breadth of its applications. The first is an anaerobic “digester” that processes manure from roughly a dozen farms into biogas in Martinsburg, a Blair County town with a population of less than 2,000 located an hour east of Johnstown. Then there’s Project Hazelnut, a massive tech hub that is expected to eventually bring 900 jobs to Luzerne County.
It’s important to say, however, that Fast Track’s dashboard and promise of interagency cooperation will only be as good as their execution. The City of Pittsburgh’s similar One Stop system was also a big step forward — but the system is still plagued by delays and seeming arbitrariness. The Bellwether project already shows permitting delays on its dashboard: The visible accountability is good, but improvement is even better.
Still, Fast Track is yet another signal that — finally — Pennsylvania is taking economic development, and the legitimate needs of the private sector, seriously again.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via TNS
