Gov. Josh Shapiro visited Big Tom’s Barber Shop in the Hill District Tuesday, touting improvements in the speed of permit processing.
Shapiro has pushed Pennsylvania officials to reduce the time it takes to process around 2,400 kinds of business licenses and permits, he said. That boosts the economy, Shapiro said, because nearly a million Pennsylvanians require some kind of license to work.
One of those is Tom Boyd Sr. who recently had to renew his barber’s license. While it took two weeks to process Tom’s license when Shapiro took office, now it only takes a single day, Shapiro said. And the time savings means a lot of additional haircuts.
“Fifteen cuts a day! You think about that–every day that goes by that someone's not getting paid if they don't have their license,” he said.
He listed off several other permits that applicants can now get more quickly, including licenses for new businesses: The turnaround time for those used to be eight weeks, Shapiro said. It’s now done in three days. And last week he signed an executive order that he said will help shepard big developers through their various applications.
“It is critically important whether you're a barber or whether you're trying to develop some big site … to be able to get your applications, your license, your permits processed much more quickly,” Shapiro said.
Al Schmidt, the secretary of the commonwealth, said he’s pushed his staff to work extra hours to meet Shapiro’s ambitious new targets for processing permits. State employees, he said, were working “a lot of weekends, a lot of late nights to try to get those numbers to where they should be and make them as good as they possibly can be.”
Schmidt said he was also able to hire additional staff. “The department had a significant number of vacancies in positions to fill. And that frequently happens at the end of a previous administration,” Schmidt said. “So we really worked closely with our counterparts at the Office of Administration to fill those vacancies.”
Pennsylvania now offers a money-back guarantee that it will respond to permit applications within a set time period. So far, Shapiro said, the state has only had to give three refunds.
