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When I was a young intern at California’s Department of Finance, working on the California Economic Recovery Task Force in the wake of the Great Recession, I watched David Crane, then a special economic advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, hold court with his usual mix of verve and vigor.
One day, offhandedly, he asked another intern a deceptively simple question: What are the five things you would need to build high speed rail in California?
That question stuck with me. Not because it has a clean answer -- it does not -- but because two decades later, California high speed rail has languished in procedural purgatory, accumulating permits, lawsuits, and political symbolism, while the basic challenge Crane was pointing to remains unresolved. Before you can build, you have to know what it would take to build. And in much of America, particularly in California, that first step is the hardest one.
We talk endlessly about approvals. About CEQA, NEPA, litigation risk, and political opposition. But long before any of that, there is a quieter failure point that kills projects before they can even be opposed. The act of figuring out what permits even apply is itself expensive, uncertain, and opaque. There is rarely an authoritative list at the outset, especially for projects that are even mildly innovative. Instead, project sponsors rely on highly paid consultants, deep institutional memory, or sheer persistence to navigate a maze of forking paths.
From a decision calculus perspective, that uncertainty alone is often enough to stall or kill projects before they begin.
In my hometown, I worked on a stormwater retention project that initially appeared straightforward. It was conceived as a partnership between public agencies and a local environmental nonprofit. The operating assumption for years was that no new permits would be required and that joint funding was feasible.
As the project moved closer to implementation, requirements multiplied. New permits were requested. Property rights questions surfaced. Federal agencies that had not been involved in that location for nearly a century were suddenly back in play. Additional consultation with fish and wildlife agencies was raised.
All of this was for work that amounted to digging a ditch in a debris basin that is mechanically cleared every year.
The project ultimately succeeded, but only because a senior official suggested shifting the work slightly to rely on an existing use permit held by a partnering nonprofit. It should not take a Disney plot arc to deliver routine public infrastructure. Yet this is the norm rather than the exception.
When I was a young intern at California’s Department of Finance, working on the California Economic Recovery Task Force in the wake of the Great Recession, I watched David Crane, then a special economic advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, hold court with his usual mix of verve and vigor.
One day, offhandedly, he asked another intern a deceptively simple question: What are the five things you would need to build high speed rail in California?
That question stuck with me. Not because it has a clean answer -- it does not -- but because two decades later, California high speed rail has languished in procedural purgatory, accumulating permits, lawsuits, and political symbolism, while the basic challenge Crane was pointing to remains unresolved. Before you can build, you have to know what it would take to build. And in much of America, particularly in California, that first step is the hardest one.
We talk endlessly about approvals. About CEQA, NEPA, litigation risk, and political opposition. But long before any of that, there is a quieter failure point that kills projects before they can even be opposed. The act of figuring out what permits even apply is itself expensive, uncertain, and opaque. There is rarely an authoritative list at the outset, especially for projects that are even mildly innovative. Instead, project sponsors rely on highly paid consultants, deep institutional memory, or sheer persistence to navigate a maze of forking paths.
From a decision calculus perspective, that uncertainty alone is often enough to stall or kill projects before they begin.
In my hometown, I worked on a stormwater retention project that initially appeared straightforward. It was conceived as a partnership between public agencies and a local environmental nonprofit. The operating assumption for years was that no new permits would be required and that joint funding was feasible.
As the project moved closer to implementation, requirements multiplied. New permits were requested. Property rights questions surfaced. Federal agencies that had not been involved in that location for nearly a century were suddenly back in play. Additional consultation with fish and wildlife agencies was raised.
All of this was for work that amounted to digging a ditch in a debris basin that is mechanically cleared every year.
The project ultimately succeeded, but only because a senior official suggested shifting the work slightly to rely on an existing use permit held by a partnering nonprofit. It should not take a Disney plot arc to deliver routine public infrastructure. Yet this is the norm rather than the exception.
Around the same time, I watched a separate construction project unfold at the seam between the City of Los Angeles and an adjoining Los Angeles County city. What appeared on paper to be a modest scope of work became a procedural labyrinth once crews realized a major tree would need to be removed. The tree happened to sit within a right of way that was technically classified as a highway. That single classification pulled in Caltrans, layered state processes atop city approvals, and triggered an entirely different review regime.
Nothing about the physical work had changed. Only the jurisdictional geometry had.
This is the pretzel palace of critical complexity that quietly governs how California builds. A patchwork of boundaries, legacy definitions, and overlapping authorities that can turn a shovel ready project into a months long exercise in institutional choreography. Across the state, the cumulative effect is that many small, beneficial projects are never pursued at all. Not because they are controversial, but because the first step is too opaque to justify the effort.
Ambiguity is corrosive. It discourages investment, drains momentum, and quietly ensures that adaptation happens slower than climate reality demands.
Zoom out, and the stakes sharpen. California is in the middle of a once in a century transition. We are being forced to rethink how we manage water, energy, land, and risk. The choice is not between building and not building. The choice is between intentional stewardship and thoughtless terraforming.
Geothermal is a case in point. It is a proven, baseload clean energy technology with enormous potential in California. And yet, permitting complexity has repeatedly slowed or stalled projects that should be straightforward evolutions of existing systems. Even modest efforts to streamline environmental review have struggled to gain traction, despite alignment with climate goals. This is not a story about abandoning environmental protection. It is a story about systems that have lost the ability to distinguish risk management from ritual, and stewardship from slavish devotion to the status quo.
I saw this tension firsthand while participating in a California Forward effort convened by the governor to streamline permitting and maximize federal infrastructure funding. The intent was right. The urgency was real. And yet, the gravitational pull of the substantial complexity and confusion about what constituted existing processes was unmistakable. Everyone could name the problem. Fewer could say where, precisely, a project sponsor should start tomorrow morning.
That gap, between aspiration and orientation, is where I think the next chapter of civic innovation lives.
In past work under the banner of ARGO, we have returned again and again to a simple idea: that the hardest problems in infrastructure are not technological, but navigational. They are about moving through complex institutional terrain without a map. About translating between missions, norms, and time horizons. About helping people feel the stones beneath their feet as they cross an unfamiliar river.
What would it look like to treat permitting not as a static legal artifact, but as a living system worthy of study, care, and design? To make the first step legible, not by flattening judgment out of government, but by illuminating how decisions actually get made? To surface the unofficial workarounds frontline staff invent every day, not to shame them, but to learn from them?
Around the same time, I watched a separate construction project unfold at the seam between the City of Los Angeles and an adjoining Los Angeles County city. What appeared on paper to be a modest scope of work became a procedural labyrinth once crews realized a major tree would need to be removed. The tree happened to sit within a right of way that was technically classified as a highway. That single classification pulled in Caltrans, layered state processes atop city approvals, and triggered an entirely different review regime.
Nothing about the physical work had changed. Only the jurisdictional geometry had.
This is the pretzel palace of critical complexity that quietly governs how California builds. A patchwork of boundaries, legacy definitions, and overlapping authorities that can turn a shovel ready project into a months long exercise in institutional choreography. Across the state, the cumulative effect is that many small, beneficial projects are never pursued at all. Not because they are controversial, but because the first step is too opaque to justify the effort.
Ambiguity is corrosive. It discourages investment, drains momentum, and quietly ensures that adaptation happens slower than climate reality demands.
Zoom out, and the stakes sharpen. California is in the middle of a once in a century transition. We are being forced to rethink how we manage water, energy, land, and risk. The choice is not between building and not building. The choice is between intentional stewardship and thoughtless terraforming.
Geothermal is a case in point. It is a proven, baseload clean energy technology with enormous potential in California. And yet, permitting complexity has repeatedly slowed or stalled projects that should be straightforward evolutions of existing systems. Even modest efforts to streamline environmental review have struggled to gain traction, despite alignment with climate goals. This is not a story about abandoning environmental protection. It is a story about systems that have lost the ability to distinguish risk management from ritual, and stewardship from slavish devotion to the status quo.
I saw this tension firsthand while participating in a California Forward effort convened by the governor to streamline permitting and maximize federal infrastructure funding. The intent was right. The urgency was real. And yet, the gravitational pull of the substantial complexity and confusion about what constituted existing processes was unmistakable. Everyone could name the problem. Fewer could say where, precisely, a project sponsor should start tomorrow morning.
That gap, between aspiration and orientation, is where I think the next chapter of civic innovation lives.
In past work under the banner of ARGO, we have returned again and again to a simple idea: that the hardest problems in infrastructure are not technological, but navigational. They are about moving through complex institutional terrain without a map. About translating between missions, norms, and time horizons. About helping people feel the stones beneath their feet as they cross an unfamiliar river.
What would it look like to treat permitting not as a static legal artifact, but as a living system worthy of study, care, and design? To make the first step legible, not by flattening judgment out of government, but by illuminating how decisions actually get made? To surface the unofficial workarounds frontline staff invent every day, not to shame them, but to learn from them?
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