Business thrives on transparency. 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 displayed a series of Gantt charts that 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. Gone was the traditional black box. Any business or citizen could now simply hop on PEEP and see exactly where any permit application stood and when to expect a decision. And if there was a delay, users could also see who was responsible. As they quickly found, delays were often not with DEQ itself. Many times, the delay was caused by another permitting body or even by the contractor the applicant had hired to seek the permit. Regardless, the applicant now knew where to go to try to speed things up.

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%.

In light of these enormous successes, Governor Youngkin tasked the Office of Regulatory Management (ORM) with building on the DEQ PEEP pilot program to extend the dashboard to all state agencies. Early this year, this expanded dashboard, which is now called “Virginia Permit Transparency” or “VPT,” launched with two additional agencies: the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) and Department of Energy. On June 21, VPT expanded to include three more agencies: the Department of Health, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

With these recent additions, VPT now covers the vast majority of permit applications in the state. It will include around 100,000 permit applications per year. And it can be expanded to include the handful of remaining permits that are not currently displayed.

VPT is a game changer for Virginia businesses, agencies, and citizens. It brings an unprecedented level of transparency to the permitting process: no other state, or the federal government, has anything that even approaches the same level of comprehensiveness.

And now that almost all the major permits are available on VPT, Virginia agencies can turn their attention to finding ways to speed up the process. As noted above, DEQ has cut its average processing time by nearly Three fourths. VPT will enable the other participating agencies to find opportunities to expedite their process as well.

VPT sends a clear signal that Virginia is open for business. And people are taking notice. Just this month, CNBC named Virginia America’s Top State for Business. As these initiatives continue apace, Virginia will further solidify its reputation as the leader among the states both for promoting business and implementing commonsense reforms that make everyone’s life easier.