How to Negotiate Permits that Ensure Project Success

Negotiating project-appropriate conditions for your environmental permits will help avoid costly consequences, such as construction delays, tied-up bonding capacity, and extraneous years of site mitigation, monitoring and maintenance.

Mike Sweesy, Dudek principal, offer five tips on how to tailor a final permit negotiation strategy that is mutually satisfactory to regulatory agencies and your project’s schedule and budget.

Identify issues and solutions up front. Regulatory documents include a lot of boilerplate language that may be inconsistent with the specifics of your project (e.g., a species identified in the permit isn’t located on the project site). An experienced permitting specialist and the project’s technical team (engineers, construction managers, environmental experts) should conduct a permit review to identify unnecessary obstacles to your project and develop work-around solutions, opening the way to effective negotiations with the resource agencies.

Read more on Dudek’s blog.