Virginia’s new permits website boosts government ‘transparency,’ says governor
Virginians can now track and search for permits online at the new Virginia Permit Transparency website, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Wednesday.
The website allows the public to use a “centralized platform” to track the daily status of and timeline of “critical steps” for the state’s permits, according to a press release. Users can look for permit applications on the website and sort through results by agency, application number, locality and other filters.
The permits that are currently available on the website include the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, Virginia Energy and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. Additional agencies will be added in the coming months, according to the press release.
The website offers a help page that assists users with “important terminology” alongside of a site list of all the current participating agencies and associated permits that the public can find on the Virginia Permit Transparency Website.
“Our administration is committed to increasing transparency in the permitting process,” Youngkin said in the release. “The Virginia Permit Transparency website allows Virginia to continue to lead the country by bringing greater visibility to the regulatory and permitting processes. Virginia is demonstrating how a transparent permitting process can continue to attract top-quality business and job opportunities.”
Originally, the Virginia Permit Transparency website was launched as a pilot program called Permitting Enhancement and Evaluation Platform, or PEEP, at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. A promotional video for that program, which includes a man holding a conversation with a Peeps marshmallow bunny, demonstrates how the public can easily view real-time updates to various permits.
The Environmental Council awarded the pilot project the 2023 State Program Innovation Award, and described the system as a “public project management system that displays schedules for permitting decisions and aims to organize workload for timely permitting decisions.”
