Air Quality Permit Reforms in Utah

摘要

As Utah experienced unprecedented industrial growth during the late 80's, the workload of reviewing air permit applications for new and modified pollution sources became excessive. Customers perceived the permitting process as excessively time-consuming, cumbersome, inconsistent, poorly coordinated with customer needs, and unresponsive. Total Quality Management principles were applied to evaluate and redesign the heavily backlogged permit process. A quality action team, facilitated by a Quality Management consultant, was formed from the New Source Review Section staff, and FADE (Focus, Analyze, Develop, and Execute) process was applied. The re-designed air permitting process incorporated: team approach in reviews, empowerment and project ownership for review engineers, electronic project tracking system, permit boilerplate, generic permits, customer involvement, increased and improved communications, continuous improvements, etc. Since 1991, the new air permitting process has been implemented and the improvements continually introduced. The new process has reduced the turn around time for issuing permits from an average of 279 days in 1992 to an average of 116 days in 1997. This paper describes how the total quality management principles were applied in redesigning the backlogged and outdated permitting process to substantially reduce the permitting time without increasing the staff.