Industrial Gas Group Seeks Boost in Forest Service's Permitting Budget
- Thread starter MarvB
- Start date
BigHornRam
Well-known member
Marv,
I thought Mark Twain said "Whenever you find yourself on the side of Jose, it's time to pause and reflect".
So what's your take on this? My closest experience with this would be the building permit process. Building permit fees generally fund the Building Inspection Departments. In times of building booms, the Building Inspectors are usually slow in adding staff causing bottle necks in plan review and inspection. They are usually hesitant to add staff fearing a future slow down would force them to layoff staff. A lot of cities make the inspection process slow and expensive on purpose in an attempt to curb growth. Is there similarities in the gas permiting process as well? Do permit fees paid by industry cover the cost to manage the process? Are the fees resonable or should they be increased? Or is the Forest Service inefficent in processing the permits? Thanks
I thought Mark Twain said "Whenever you find yourself on the side of Jose, it's time to pause and reflect".
So what's your take on this? My closest experience with this would be the building permit process. Building permit fees generally fund the Building Inspection Departments. In times of building booms, the Building Inspectors are usually slow in adding staff causing bottle necks in plan review and inspection. They are usually hesitant to add staff fearing a future slow down would force them to layoff staff. A lot of cities make the inspection process slow and expensive on purpose in an attempt to curb growth. Is there similarities in the gas permiting process as well? Do permit fees paid by industry cover the cost to manage the process? Are the fees resonable or should they be increased? Or is the Forest Service inefficent in processing the permits? Thanks
MarvB
Well-known member
Paul- (Don't know if Twain had the pleasure of ever meeting one of gunners alter-egos 
) I don't claim to have a rat’s patute of knowledge on this one other than what I have "heard" in my line of work. From what I've been told there is both a definite bottleneck on both the permitting (and inspection) processes and that, given the boom in the industry and corresponding price run ups, the permits are extremely under priced. One would think that if they would update the pricing scheme that they (again given the uplift in the industry) could self-fund more employees and lessen the bottleneck. Like most gov. operations though, regardless of funding, you still have to go through the "process" to get new or more positions established and that can be a bottleneck onto itself! I definitely don’t think they are trying to curb/limit growth of expansion in the industry though- it's pretty darn wide open right now.
The worst fear is that they don't put the necessary effort into the permitting/inspection processes and just become a rubber stamp operation to hasten the timelines....I think we'd all (except for big business of course) loose on this one. As to the Forest Service and efficiency? I'll let those currently employed speak to that one, my experiences are now 20 years ago in the past and (hopefully) things have likely improved.....that being said (again, speaking on my District) their inefficiency was one of the main reasons I decided to change careers....and that folks is post 2000! time flies when you're having fun eh
) I don't claim to have a rat’s patute of knowledge on this one other than what I have "heard" in my line of work. From what I've been told there is both a definite bottleneck on both the permitting (and inspection) processes and that, given the boom in the industry and corresponding price run ups, the permits are extremely under priced. One would think that if they would update the pricing scheme that they (again given the uplift in the industry) could self-fund more employees and lessen the bottleneck. Like most gov. operations though, regardless of funding, you still have to go through the "process" to get new or more positions established and that can be a bottleneck onto itself! I definitely don’t think they are trying to curb/limit growth of expansion in the industry though- it's pretty darn wide open right now. The worst fear is that they don't put the necessary effort into the permitting/inspection processes and just become a rubber stamp operation to hasten the timelines....I think we'd all (except for big business of course) loose on this one. As to the Forest Service and efficiency? I'll let those currently employed speak to that one, my experiences are now 20 years ago in the past and (hopefully) things have likely improved.....that being said (again, speaking on my District) their inefficiency was one of the main reasons I decided to change careers....and that folks is post 2000! time flies when you're having fun eh
