The right way or the fast way

When permitting, project challenges present themselves in various forms. The most typical challenges are related to noise mitigation, public pushback, or engineering constraints. Sometimes the greatest challenge related to a project is the clients themselves. The client–consultant relationship should ideally be one of mutual respect, with both parties working on a back-and-forth to reach the end goal within a set budget and timeline. However, a client that is domineering or perhaps is just unfamiliar with the importance of considering acoustic impacts as part of permitting, can easily cost themselves millions of dollars and add years to their permitting timeline by doing things the “fast” way, instead of doing things the “correct” way. This paper will discuss several case studies of this unfortunate phenomenon and present solutions that have been successfully put into practice.