Initiative 1
A sign permit shouldn't take six weeks.
How NCPSI's Boulder team is fixing sign permitting in Boulder, Colorado.
The problem
Boulder Revised Code 9-9-21 sets a 5-working-day window for the city to approve, deny, or refer back a sign permit. A referral back is a normal part of review, and it starts the window over. So 72% of sign permits take more than four weeks, the typical one takes 44 days, and only 5 of 309 permits issued since January 2024 made it through in a week. While the permit waits, a new business pays rent on a storefront customers can't find.
We obtained 30 permits' worth of reviewer letters, 20 of them under the Colorado Open Records Act, and tagged every comment. Applications come back for small things: a lighting spec sheet without the color temperature, or with the chosen fixture not circled; a dimension missing from the drawing, or different on two pages; a wind-load figure from the wrong city; no inventory of the signs already on the building; a freestanding sign drawn inside an easement. Review rounds ran three to five weeks apart. Four permits lost an entire round because a light fixture wasn't highlighted on a spec sheet.
Time to get a sign permit issued
- 5 of 309
- Issued within a week
- 72%
- Took more than four weeks
- 44
- Median days to issue
The approach
We are not asking Boulder to change its code or review faster. We are making the application right the first time.
- Two tools built from Boulder's own paperwork. We encoded the sign code and turned the top five reasons in the correction letters into checks. A free calculator takes a sign's type, size, lighting, and location and returns the limits, the required documents, other reviews, and the fee. A pre-check reads an uploaded permit package and flags what would be sent back before it goes to the city: lighting specs, dimensions that disagree across sheets, wind design values, a missing sign inventory, an incomplete site plan.
- Honest about certainty. Every finding names its code section and says where it comes from: the code text, a city checklist, or something the applicant must confirm. Every screen says the tool is unofficial and not a city determination.
- Measured against a baseline. We have the timing of all 382 sign permits since 2024. The pilot will measure first-review acceptance and days to issue against it.
Progress (October 2026)
- Done
The rule engine, the free calculator, 30 correction letters tagged, the pre-check rules, and extraction that reads a PDF package into the pre-check.
- In progress
The pre-check upload page and address lookup for zoning.
- Next
A pilot with two or three Boulder sign contractors, then a before-and-after shared with the City of Boulder.