Rarely dramatic. Frequently slow. The review cycles are what cost you.
| Decided by | Staff, usually |
| Type | Administrative |
| The cost | Review rounds |
| Realistic clock | 8 to 16 months |
Site plan review checks your proposed layout against the rules, parking, buffers, access, stormwater, setbacks, landscaping, lighting, fire access.
It is usually administrative, which sounds like good news and often is not. The range above covers this approval alone, not the project through to recordable lots. Nobody votes it down. It just takes another cycle. And another.
Where the time actually goes
Each round of staff comments takes two to six weeks to come back, then however long your team needs to respond, then the clock restarts. Three rounds is normal. Six happens. The difference between three and six is a full quarter, and it’s rarely caused by anything dramatic.
What causes it: comments answered individually rather than looked at as a set, so a fix to one creates a conflict with another. Departments that haven’t spoken to each other, so fire and stormwater ask for incompatible things. Resubmittals that don’t clearly show what changed, so the reviewer starts over.
Watch for the trigger that makes it discretionary
Many ordinances kick a site plan out of administrative review at a threshold, a size, a use, a proximity to a district boundary, a variance request bundled in. Once it’s in front of a board, the timeline and the risk both change.
Worth knowing before you design to a number that crosses a line.
What goes wrong
Submitting to start the clock. An incomplete submittal doesn’t start the clock, it buys you a round of comments telling you what you already knew was missing. In a growing number of jurisdictions it now earns a rejection rather than a comment.
Nobody owning the comment log. Comments arrive, get forwarded, and sit. The single highest-leverage thing on a site plan is somebody reading them the day they land and routing them within a day.
Skipping the pre-submittal meeting. Free, informal, and the cheapest round of comments you’ll ever get.
What we do
We manage the review as a process rather than a series of submissions: pre-submittal meeting first, a complete package, then comments tracked to closure with one person accountable for each. We know which departments in a given jurisdiction tend to conflict, because it’s visible in how their projects run.
You keep your engineer and your designer. We keep the process moving.
How many rounds of comments are you into?