There are set to be 36 gubernatorial elections in 2026. On the stump, the answer to rising housing costs, infrastructure backlogs, and clean energy delays is increasingly the same across the political spectrum: permitting reform. What most candidates haven’t reckoned with yet is that “permitting reform” is not a single policy. It’s a conglomeration of dozens (maybe hundreds) of small, wonky changes to laws, procedures, and cultures.
In this series, “The First 100 Days”, we’re going to share our playbook of high-impact, politically neutral approaches to reform that governors can execute in their first 100 days without even needing much help from a legislature.
#6 Build a Concierge Office
Recommendation:
Create a permitting concierge office that serves as the single point of entry for complex, multi-permit projects. Assign each major project a coordinator to sequence submittals and run reviews in parallel across divisions and outside agencies. Finally, route the team’s hard-won lessons upward to keep sharpening the process over time.
Ask any permitting analyst and they’ll tell you about their most headache-inducing project. One with infinite complexity that dragged on for years. The famed SunZia line is the national poster child for this. After analysis started in 2009, it spent nearly 14 years in review and was peppered with litigation before it was finally cleared in 2023 through the federal concierge-style process, FAST-41.
Every administration will have similarly novel and politically fraught projects. They will inevitably devour staff time and raise thorny questions reviewers may struggle to answer. Depending on the project, fear of litigation may be looming, too.
A permitting concierge service carves out a dedicated lane for precisely these complications. Fundamentally, concierge teams are made of highly skilled project managers who coordinate the review of complex projects across several programs at once. Connecticut launched one of the country’s first such services in 2020, and it has worked well enough that lawmakers voted this year to replicate the model at the state’s economic development agency. The Manresa Wilds project shows how it works.
Manresa Wilds
In 1960, the Norwalk Harbor Generating Station began littering the site with coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal. 37 years later, the area was deemed one of Connecticut’s “Filthy Five” by the CT Coalition for Clean Air.
By the time Hurricane Sandy knocked the power plant offline in 2012, 102 of the site’s 125 acres were blanketed in coal ash. The plant never reopened, but the site was desperately in need of remediation. NRG, the company that owned the plant, had a $500,000, bare minimum remediation plan in place to isolate the contamination on-site. Engineers estimated that actually removing it could cost up to $60 million.
Enter tech billionaire Austin McChord and his wife, Allison. After an evidently inspiring kayak trip, they decided to buy the contaminated site for $45 million with the hopes of turning it into a nature-focused park, open to the public. In order to do so, the McChords established Manresa Island Corp., a nonprofit dedicated to building and operating the park as a publicly accessible resource.
The remediation for the project is expected to go far beyond what engineers proposed in the aforementioned $60 million plan, to the tune of $220 million. For context, that’s more than what the state has invested in brownfield cleanup in total in the last seven years.
Suffice to say the McChords’ project is unprecedented. “This absolutely dazzling gift is one of the biggest to Connecticut in this century,” praised U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal.
As is the case with most projects of this size, permitting was always going to be complicated. The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) shared with us that the Manresa Wilds project will ultimately require coordination with a whopping eight different programs.
A key tension stems from the site’s long dormancy. Because it sat untouched for years, wildlife had largely taken over despite the contamination. Removing the contamination requires moving a great deal of earth, disturbing trees and animals in the process. At the same time, the landscape remains ecologically fragile: much of the vegetation is rooted in coal-ash fill, and invasive species are widespread, and without intervention, the site’s forest and wetland systems will continue to degrade. From a permitting perspective, it’s a layered dynamic. The brownfield remediation team’s remit is to protect human health and the environment, while the natural resource programs’ remit is to protect wildlife from disturbance. DEEP’s Client Concierge Service is bridging the gap between them so both can meet their statutory obligations while also ensuring the site’s long-term resilience.
Since the fall of 2023, dozens of DEEP staff have taken part in more than 30 meetings, now running about twice a month, convened by the Client Concierge Service team.
“We’re incredibly proud of the Client Concierge Service team,” shared Emma Cimino, Acting Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “The service they provide means projects like Manresa benefit from smoother coordination across multiple programs-providing additional clarity for applicants, more efficient use of DEEP’s expert staff, and better environmental outcomes.”
On December 31, 2025, DEEP issued the project’s Stewardship Permit, allowing remediation to begin. This will be followed by permitting and remediation of successive areas, as those plans are developed by Manresa Wilds.
“The impact of this project reaches far beyond Norwalk—Manresa is just one of hundreds of similar shuttered and polluted sites across the Northeast region and around the country,” the Chief of Design & Construction at Manresa Wilds, Chris Murphy, told us. “We hope the work we’re doing today will be a replicable roadmap for other communities seeking to transform post-industrial liabilities into resilient, regenerative public assets.”
The First 100 Days Play
Creating a concierge office is squarely within a governor’s authority, and, true to this series, shouldn’t require a legislative fight. Here’s the play:
Create a Concierge Office: Stand up a small, dedicated team that serves as the single point of entry for complex, multi-permit projects. Staff it with seasoned permitting professionals who have a strong understanding of how the agency operates. It needn’t be expensive. Connecticut started by reassigning a single existing staffer, then added more over time.
Encourage applicants to convene before submission: Offer applicants a pre-application meeting that brings every relevant program to the table at once. In Connecticut, the applicant leaves with a written roadmap of the permits they’ll need, the recommended sequence, expected timelines, and a named analyst for each. They learn the full set of requirements up front instead of discovering them over time.
Prioritize sequencing reviews: Give each major project a coordinator who maps the order of submittals, runs reviews in parallel where possible, and chases answers across divisions and agencies.
Provide consulting funds: Connecticut DEEP does not use outside contractors to help with workload, but other states might find contracting helpful in acute cases. Unprecedented projects demand an unprecedented amount of staff time. A single megaproject can tie up a wildlife biologist or a wetlands delineation expert for weeks. That can be a bottleneck in itself. The office could contract some of that work out instead, minimizing the hit to staff capacity.
Continuously surface policy solutions: A team working on megaprojects will constantly have to balance pressures to both “move faster” and “get it right”. They will become experts in exactly where those forces collide to create bottlenecks. Build a channel for the team to feed those pinch points back to the governor’s office and agency leadership, so lessons learned from each hard project can inform policy changes that make the next one easier.