Developers looking to apply for certain Pennsylvania construction permits can skip to the front of the line by applying for the Department of Environmental Protection’s Streamlining Permits for Economic Expansion and Development (SPEED) program, which opens today.

The program allows applicants an option to use an external qualified professional who is approved by the DEP to take a first crack at reviewing their permit applications. Then, the qualified professional — drawn from such groups as licensed engineers, surveyors, or environmental scientists — will submit that review to the department.

The department will make the final call on the permit application based on that recommendation. Applicants would pay all fees required by the external reviewer, in addition to typical permit application fees.

“The SPEED program is just a staff augmentation program,” said Ramez Ziadeh, acting executive deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. “It’s not a third-party review program.”

The initiative is part of a package of permitting reforms by the Shapiro administration aimed at unclogging a backlog of environmental permits and fast-tracking construction in the state.

Each year, the DEP processes between 40,000 to 45,000 permit authorizations across all permit areas ranging from air quality to any kind of construction that involves “earth disturbance.” In 2023, the department had a backlog of 2,200 permit applications. Now, it stands at about 100 applications, according to the DEP.

The SPEED program is currently available for permits covering only Chapter 102 Stormwater Discharges Associated with Construction Activities, but others will open up in July. These include certain permits related to air quality, earth disturbance, dam construction and water obstruction. They would apply to projects ranging from warehouses to large homes to bridges to docks on a lake.

For developers, the permitting process can be a costly headache. Across the country, “nobody thinks theirs works well enough or fast enough. But Pennsylvania, historically, has had a reputation for being particularly slow or difficult,” according to Don Smith, president of the Regional Industrial Development Corp., a nonprofit economic development organization. Smith said he plans to use the SPEED program.

“Time is money, and predictability is absolutely essential to undertaking a project,” he said. “You put together a project budget of how much it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take and when you’re going to be able to lease the project and derive some of the revenue back to pay back the money you’ve invested in the project.

“And so having a permitting process that is transparent, that is speedy, and that is consistent are three fundamental principles of every good permitting process and one that very few across the country meet,” Smith said. “But I think the SPEED process that the governor and legislative leaders have put together is a good step in the right direction.”

These permits are critical for complying with environmental regulations, according to Brigitte Meyer, staff attorney at PennFuture, a statewide environmental advocacy organization.

For stormwater permits, for example, “the whole process is designed to ensure that when the applicant causes the earth disturbance, it doesn’t result in some kind of detrimental stormwater runoff,” Meyer said.

“If you cut down a forest and build a warehouse, when the rain hits the ground, it behaves very differently when it lands on pavement,” Meyer added. “That permit is designed to make sure that you are installing stormwater-management facilities that control the change in the stormwater runoff so there’s not suddenly a ton of water flowing onto your neighbor’s property or uncontrolled into a stream with a bunch of pollutants.”

In addition to the backlog, the timelines for these reviews range from 30 to 180 days, which can be extended if the application is incomplete or reviewers request additional information. This unpredictability is central to developers’ ire.

“Of course we want permits to be enforced because they protect us,” Smith said. “This is an issue that everybody should care about because if permitting is too costly and takes too long and [is] too unpredictable, what that means is fewer projects and fewer jobs and lower tax revenue for every municipality and every family across the Commonwealth.”

Environmental groups, such as PennFuture, are concerned that the SPEED program could lead to pressure on DEP reviewers to “rubber-stamp” the external recommendation because of time pressure. Private firms are not subject to public right-to-know laws, potentially resulting in a lack of transparency around the reviews. Using external reviewers, instead of hiring more DEP staff, could erode public trust in the capabilities of DEP reviewers, paving the way for more privatization, Meyer said.

”The purpose of these permitting programs is not primarily to facilitate business and construction,” Meyer said. “It’s not to serve as an obstacle to those things, but it is to make sure that those things happen in a way that is consistent with protecting the environment. And sometimes that takes a while, and that’s OK. We should not be undercutting the review process for the sole purpose of making it faster so people can build things and do things faster at the expense of not getting the amount of review that is necessary to ensure the protection of the environment.”

The DEP ran a pilot of the SPEED program with the goal of reducing the overall processing review time frame by 73 business days. The agency didn’t quite hit that goal, according to Ziadeh, but “we still reduced it significantly in certain instances by 30 business days, 40 business days. Overall, it’s been a success.”

The department is also planning on introducing a new electronic-permitting platform that would automate simple certifications, licenses and authorizations.

“If [developers] are serious about getting their permit reviewed quickly, they have options,” Ziadeh said. “They can use the pilot, they can use SPEED, they can just put it through the review process, and we’re doing really well. We’re more efficient now than we’ve been in recent years.”