Managing the jurisdiction

Submittals, staff comments, revisions, hearing prep, conditions. Somebody has to own the file.

An entitlement is not a document you submit. It’s a relationship you maintain for somewhere between nine and thirty months.

Someone has to know the reviewer by name and know when they’re on leave. Someone has to notice that the agenda for the meeting your item is on got posted a week early. Someone has to be reading the comments the day they arrive rather than the week before resubmittal, and someone has to be in the room when the conditions get written.

On most deals that person is whoever has the least capacity to do it, a VP of land acquisition with nine other deals, or an engineer who is being paid to design rather than to manage a political process.

What we carry

• Pre-submittal meetings and written interpretation requests, before anything gets filed
• The application, the submittal package and every resubmittal
• Staff comments, read on arrival, routed to whoever answers them, tracked to closure
• Community information meetings and neighbor outreach
• Board and commission preparation, and presenting where that’s useful
• Conditions of approval: negotiating them, and writing down what was actually agreed in the room

This is not the other project management

Entitlement project management manages the jurisdiction. Development project management manages the build team. Same discipline, different room, and we say so plainly because otherwise it looks like the same service billed twice.

One is a political process with a technical component. The other is a technical process with a political tail.