Hitting snag with Gov't bureaucracy in permitting

[Dan Thomas]

This is my first development project. I am building a brewery / restaurant in my home town. Knowing what I don't know I hired a reputable civil engineering firm to handle my site plan. It has taken WAY longer than I expected, which is ok. My issue is that we are finally through planning and I am at my last step before construction which is obtaining a curb cut permit from NHDOT. They had several trivial issues with my application (which was submitted through the engineering firm) but they had one major issue. We knew we did not comply with the sight distance requirement of 400' in each direction for the location of the curb cut. We have 400' in one direction and 3xx' in the other. We do comply with federal AASHTO guidelines and used that to justify our stance. The DOT is not willing to work with us and is insisting I redo my site plan to move the location of the curb cut to a location that they deem "better", but still does not meet their requirements. I have escalated to the governors office and have been assigned a liason but have not gotten anywhere really. The DOTs position is that we should have consulted with them concurrently in the design phase and because we didnt we took on this risk.

My questions:

1. Are there other levels of escalation available to me that are fast? Phase 1 of my build is an outdoor beer garden so it will be seasonal and we are a few weeks out from that season. My project dies for the year if I don't have that permit by the end of next week.

2. Should my engineer have known to consult DOT during his design and was this an error in his judgment or is this a normal or unforeseen circumstance?

My engineer did briefly mention to me this was a risk but felt comfortable defending our position based on our compliance with AASHTO and we never discussed again.

[Chris Seveney]

@Dan Thomas

As a civil engineer, a former planning board member and someone who had to do a curb cut on Virginia DOT road for my home I have some experience in this.

100% absolutely your engineer should have been talking with DOT early on, especially if site distances are not met as that is a safety issue and one that is very hard to overcome. When I was on planning board that was typically the one thing we would not negotiate on.

When we were building our home we wanted to put a circular driveway in and sent thepreliminary site plan to vdot to review and they came back with a lot of comments which led us to not move in that direction

Also whatever project you are considering always assume it will take 2-3x longer to get permitted than you anticipated and you will spend 2x what your civil says it will because they live in La La land and quote it based on the best case scenario with these jurisdictions