How To Address the Causes and Costs of Permitting Delays Before the “Shot Clock” Runs Out

• An Oregon-commissioned study priced excessive permitting delays at up to $33,500 per unit for some projects, and a state senator admits his own legislature is partly responsible for them.

• Oregon’s SB 974 “shot clock” law forces faster engineering plan review, and efforts are underway to fast-track inspectors and plan examiners for building departments already short on staff.

• AI-assisted plan review, built on a maturity model that earns trust before scaling, gives departments a way to help close the review-time gap without a matching increase in headcount.

When the shot clock expires in basketball, the team that had possession of the ball loses possession. There’s no gray area. In that respect, Oregon’s “shot clock” bill SB 974 that Oregon State Senator Dick Anderson (R-Lincoln City) mentioned in his OBOA 2026 Legislator Keynote is not a direct analogy to a shot clock. Under the law, if the municipality does not approve or deny within the allotted time, the applicant can appeal to a circuit court.

However, Oregon SB 974, like other, stronger, “shot clock” bills in process around the United States, is still a check on local building departments’ autonomy over their own permitting process. And Anderson showed up in front of an audience of building officials to tell them that elected legislators are partly to blame for this trend of permitting deregulation.

“There’s some things we have done that have caused these delays, caused processes to take longer, and we’re part of the problem,” Anderson says.

Still, regardless of who or what causes permitting delays, local building departments are left holding the bag and charged to do something about this problem, which has real costs and consequences if left unaddressed.

An eye-popping number stood out from Anderson’s keynote speech: $33,500 per unit. That’s the per-unit cost that iterative permitting reviews can exact on multi-unit and middle-density residential projects, according to the Oregon legislature’s own commissioned research. The roughly 130-page Local Residential Development Process Improvement (LRDPI) Study from the Housing Accountability and Production Office (HAPO) is in public commenting through September 2026.

The study’s numbers varied according to different local markets for development projects, but at the long end of an iterative review process, they were $30,750–33,500 per unit due to additional carrying costs, design fees, and review expenses, both for an example “40-unit residential rental development on a vacant site within city limits” and an example “quadplex using concurrent middle housing land division (MHLD).”

These costs are high enough to make otherwise feasible developments uncompetitive for financing, the study claims. When that happens, they either try to increase sale or rent prices, impacting affordability. Or if that’s not enough, they may abandon a project altogether before construction.

“When we talk about time and money,” Anderson says, “the state has put up numbers to it.”

The research also does not let its own legislators off the hook, according to Anderson. “This study is blaming—and rightfully—legislators, which I think we need to hear and point out,” he says.

For example, the LRDPI report notes that some housing legislation requires local governments to repeatedly update codes, procedures, and information for applicants, adding to training, staffing, and resource constraints.

Anderson also notes that some of those legislated code updates lead to redundancies. As many as 25% of building code provisions may be redundant, he says.

As a result, he doesn’t just want building departments to move faster; he’s also asking for legislatures to shoulder responsibility. “Which ones could we eliminate?” he asks of the redundant codes, pointing out that when lawmakers move slowly, it’s not always for the greatest reasons. “It took us 72 years in order to allow people to pump their own gas,” he says. “It may have been a good idea once, but it doesn’t always need to be.”

Anderson shows he understands the elected government’s role in building departments’ permitting predicaments. However, Oregon’s Senate Bill 974 went into effect July 1, 2026, and like similar “shot-clock” laws, it comes across as chastising building departments for problems Anderson would say are not all their fault.

It puts a statutory cap on how long “final engineering plans” review can take for residential development inside an urban growth boundary. SB 974 gives local governments 30 days to confirm that a permit application was “complete when submitted or specify all additional materials that must be included.” From there, they have 120 days to approve or deny the application. (The clock can pause while a local government waits on corrections, and applicants can request extensions up to 245 days total.)

With other “shot clock” bills, a missed deadline results in automatic approval or a rerouting to a private plan reviewer. However, with SB 974, if the clock runs out, the permit applicant can appeal to a circuit court, which has to grant it unless the local government can show that approving the plans would violate a substantive regulation.

In light of Anderson’s admissions that state legislatures can be responsible for some of the code-related provisions putting pressure on building department staffing resources, it seems an unfortunate twist of fate that shot clock bills like SB 974 just add to those staffing pressures. 

The Oregon Building Officials Association (OBOA) is already working on formalizing building code apprenticeship and micro-credentials to address statewide building inspector and plans examiner shortages in conjunction with community college training programs. And Anderson’s Q&A sessions surfaced the idea that Oregon may want to revive its decades-old “Master Builder Program,” which lets approved builders self-certify and carry out certain inspections.

Yet the larger dilemma is not how the workforce can catch up to the law, but how faster plan review works when you can’t just hire your way there.

Brant Birkeland, Principal Director, AI Permitting Solutions, Archistar, posed a practical answer to that question at the 2026 Los Angeles Digital Government Summit (LADGS) panel: “AI One Year Later: Lessons from Implementation.” This panel session discussed what municipalities and vendors have learned in the last year of implementing AI in government.

Referring to a real-world example of a complex hotel project with around 5,000 pages of plans, Birkeland says, “We can build models around the plans and identify the plan issues off the bat.”

By catching problems automatically, before they reach a human reviewer’s desk, review timelines can actually be compressed. Instead of more people reading faster, there are fewer avoidable review cycles.

Yet when implementing AI, Birkeland cautions against thinking of deployment as the finish line. To maintain success with AI, there is a whole AI tool lifecycle. There is testing and piloting to do before deployment to make sure the tool works for the results you want. “Figure out where you can add AI to streamline the process; test it; make sure it doesn’t hallucinate; make sure it comes back with accurate data,” he says.

Then after deployment, there are necessary steps like maintenance and using the collected data to improve its output. “You’re going to have to monitor those agents,” Birkeland says, “make sure they’re performing correctly.”

Trust in an AI tool’s results is also essential, Birkeland says. It contributes to an organization’s AI maturity level. “First, we try to understand, what is the level of maturity of the organization or department in the specific context we’re trying to serve? Maturity with AI is really about trust and confidence. You can scale in maturity the more users trust and have confidence in the result of the product.”

While happening independently at separate events, Anderson’s and Birkeland’s insights read like opposite ends of the same problem. The Oregon study Anderson cited found that legislators and duplicative code contributed to permitting delays.  And Birkeland’s AI maturity model describes a framework for clearing friction from a review process without removing the review itself. Building officials can lose fewer hours to redundant reviews, while having more hours available for judgment calls that need close human attention.

While onerous legislation can lead to concerns over building department staff shortages, adopting automation tools has not proved to be a recipe for workforce reduction. For example, at the 2026 LADGS keynote address, AI inventor, author, and futurist Jonathan Brill described working with a large consumer electronics company that automated roughly a third of its functions, and headcount actually increased.

That also tracks with what’s going on in the realm of AI plan review: Nobody on Birkeland’s panel claimed AI was eliminating jobs in permitting departments. Instead, people are changing what they spend their time doing.

Elected legislators and vendors may reach similar conclusions about permitting review, but Anderson doesn’t want to exclude building officials from discussions about their own outcomes. Rather, he ended his keynote speech with an appeal to discuss and work with them. “I’d like you to bring us the ideas only inspectors would know,” he says. “The next housing bill should be one you helped write, not one you found out about after we passed it.”