On Monday morning there are nine proposals sitting in the owner's inbox at a twenty-person roofing and siding company. Seven are estimates for the kind of job the company does every week: a tear-off and replacement on a flat commercial roof, a siding job on a ranch house, a set of replacement windows. None goes out until the owner has looked at it, and the owner is on a job site until Wednesday. Two of the customers will have signed with someone else by then.
Nobody decided that a standard window job needs the owner's eyes. The review started when the company was small and every job was unusual, and it never stopped.
The step Minneapolis stopped asking for
The City of Minneapolis made exactly that decision about one of its own reviews. In a news release dated October 2, 2026, the city said it has removed the building plan review requirement for specific project types, including commercial and residential flat roofs, siding, and replacement windows and doors. Under the old process, the city says, those projects moved through a series of administrative steps; the new process eliminates plan review for them.
What the city kept matters as much as what it dropped. Projects still have to comply with the applicable building codes. Mayor Jacob Frey called the change "cutting unnecessary red tape," and the city's community planning and economic development director, Erik Hansen, said it frees staff to address more complex issues.
Only the city's own account of this was available; nothing here has been independently confirmed. The release gives no start date, but says applicants are already seeing faster approvals under the new process, citing residential remodel permits that fell from around three weeks to under one week on average.
It is an extension, not a first. The city already offered an opt-in express online permit, which the release describes as working without the same level of staff review; the city's express permits page limits it to pre-approved licensed contractors working on existing one- or two-family homes, for jobs including siding, same-size windows and reroofs. The October change removes plan review for these job types more broadly, including flat roofs, commercial work and doors, for every applicant.
Look at the steps on the standard path. Before: prepare plans, upload them, wait in the review queue, get approved, pay, get the permit. After: apply, pay, get the permit. The city expects hundreds of permits a year to be issued, or available for payment, within one to two days; some may be available immediately. The review did not get faster. For those jobs, it stopped existing.
What a review is actually checking
"Have the owner look at it" sounds like one step. It is three questions.
Is it complete? Every line item there, the right customer, the right address. That is clerical, and a checklist or the estimating software catches it.
Is it within the rules? Priced from the current book, margin above the floor, standard warranty terms. That is a rule, and a rule can be written down and applied by the estimator.
Is this job unusual? Rotted decking nobody can see yet, a customer who has already sued one contractor, an unpermitted addition the siding job would expose. That is judgment, and it is the only question that needs the owner. On routine work, the answer is almost always no.
Do the same with your own approvals. Write down what routine means: job type, size, standard materials, price-book pricing, no structural work. Proposals inside that line go out without the owner. Everything outside it still waits. And keep a check after the fact: once a week the owner reads a handful of the proposals that went out, and at closeout looks at margin by job.
Who will resist, and why they are right
The owner. Every so often the review does catch a pricing mistake, and the owner remembers each one. They are right that the line will creep: a job that is almost routine gets called routine to skip the queue. If the weekly read-through quietly stops happening, nothing is checking the work, and the owner will find out at closeout. That check is what makes dropping the review safe.
When not to drop the review
The honest no: our rule of thumb is that if the owner's review changes the price or scope on more than about one routine proposal in ten, the work is not routine yet. Fix the price book and the estimating first, then drop the review. And if you cannot write down in two sentences what makes a job routine, you do not have a class of work to exempt.
If this is your Thursday afternoon, the ten agent roles are in the Library.