The Approvals Question Worksheet.
Your city is two offices, not one. The planning department decides what and where. The building department decides how, and whether it is safe. A planning approval is permission for the concept — it is not permission to build.
Use this worksheet before your design locks. Work through it at your desk, then take it with you to a pre-submittal visit and fill in the answers at the counter.
I show up at the moments in this worksheet where homeowners usually guess. The checkboxes tell you which offices your project touches and which review track you are headed for. The question columns are what you carry through the door. Answer honestly — a worksheet that flatters your project is worth nothing at the counter.
Which offices does your project actually touch?
The trigger is almost always the outside of the building. Check everything your project does. If nothing here applies, you are likely going straight to the building department.
Both departments have to say yes before anyone pours concrete. Knowing which ones you touch determines how much lead time your schedule needs.
This is why neighbors give each other terrible advice about permits. One got a kitchen approved in four days, the other waited four months for an addition. Both are telling the truth. They were describing two different departments.
Which track are you on — and who decides?
Homeowners assume the city decides whether their neighbors get a vote. It does not. You decide at the design table, months before anyone applies for anything. Check only the statements you can answer yes to with confidence.
Track one is administrative — a planner checks your plans against the standards and signs them. Track two notifies your neighbors, posts your plans, and puts your house on a meeting calendar.
A two-foot setback encroachment is not a two-foot decision. It is a decision to open your project to public comment, to add months, to add design fees for revisions, and to hand people who have never met you the ability to object on the record. Hearing dates are set by when the body meets, not by when you are ready. One continuance is another month. Ask your architect directly: what would it take to stay inside the rules, and what do I lose? Sometimes the answer is worth fighting for. Make that choice on purpose.
Two offices. Two question sets.
Print this page and carry it in. Check each question as you ask it and write the answer in the box underneath. Vague questions get general answers; these are specific on purpose.
Work down both columns. The ones you cannot get answered at the counter are the ones to put in writing.
What you carry through the door.
The pre-submittal visit exists almost everywhere and it is usually free. The difference between a vague conversation and a useful one is entirely what you bring.
Assemble the items above before you call. That hour is the highest return hour in your entire project — do not spend it on questions you could have answered at home.
The planner across that table is not your adversary. Their job is to apply a written set of rules consistently to everybody in town — including the neighbor who wants to build something that would wreck your view. What makes a planner difficult is an application that makes their job impossible. Not you.
Three gates, in this order.
Your homeowners association is not a side road running parallel to the city. It is an input to your city application. People get this backwards and it is expensive: they take a design all the way through planning, walk it to the committee, and get asked to change the thing the city just signed off on.
Get the design guidelines before schematic design starts. Submit survey and topo, site plan, floor plans and elevations, color scheme, preliminary landscape. Add three-dimensional renderings even when they are not required, and attend the meeting yourself. Read your covenants, conditions, and restrictions for the committee’s response window — in many documents, silence past that window is a default approval.
The formal approval lands late, but the research behind it belongs before anyone draws a line. Planning approval is permission for the concept. You cannot pour concrete on it. Bring the HOA approval letter — planning is usually the office that asks for it.
Planning is sitting in this review too. They pull your final plans and compare them to what they approved months ago. If the design moved meaningfully while you developed it, you can be looking at a re-review — this time against a full construction document set instead of a schematic.
You can do it. You are betting that planning changes nothing. If they change something, you are revising a full construction document set instead of an early schematic design. That is the trade you are actually making.
What the clock actually looks like.
Two months is the floor for a conforming project, not the average. It depends on the city’s workload and enormously on the quality of what you handed them. A clean, complete application moves to the top of the pile. A sloppy, non-conforming one bounces around for months and comes back as a long list of corrections.
Planner works through your submittal
Questions and required changes go back to your architect
Resubmittal review, then ideally approval
The floor for a conforming project. Track two runs in months, not weeks.
Turn two months of waiting into two months of progress.
Time is a cost. It never appears on a bid sheet, but every extra month in approvals is a month of carrying costs, and on a long approval it quietly becomes one of the larger line items in the project. Whether drawings keep progressing during the wait is your design professional’s risk call. Everything below carries no risk at all — none of it touches planning’s criteria.
Every one of these you settle during the wait is one that is not holding up your job in month nine.
These are exactly the decisions that pile up later and start delaying construction. You have a window here where nobody is waiting on you. Use it, and month nine looks completely different.