Of the 14 members of the task force that Gov. Jenniffer González Colón designated to produce the report that led to the proposed Planning and Permits Code, none has academic training in public administration, land surveying or environmental science, some of the fields essential to any permitting reform, according to experts consulted and testimony on the bill reviewed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo.
International construction and permitting guidelines and standards reviewed by the CPI also stress the importance of including professionals from different disciplines — and communities — at various stages of reforms to permitting systems. Among the disciplines commonly involved and recommended by organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank Group and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council are administrative law, public administration, public policy, project management, economics, data science, information systems, information technology, geospatial sciences, cybersecurity, planning and land use, engineering, environmental science, geology and agronomy, among others.
Lawyers predominate in the Permitting Simplification Task Force appointed by the governor. There are eight in total, but none specializes in administrative, constitutional or environmental law, areas of expertise that would have been essential in preparing the report that led to the legislative measure proposing a new Permits Code that eliminates environmental protections and prioritizes the use of private property. The group includes professionals with multiple areas of training, including four in business administration, two in geography, two in economics, three in planning and three in engineering.
“We have a mix of people with extensive experience working on permitting issues, and young people, some of whom come from the private sector and have a vision for change,” the governor said early in 2025 when she presented the task force, which published a report late last year with recommendations to reform the permitting system.
Among the Executive Cabinet representatives on the task force is Francisco Domenech Fernández, chief of staff and executive director of the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, known as AAFAF, who has no professional experience related to permitting processes, planning or environmental protection on his résumé. Domenech is an attorney and has worked as a legislative adviser and lobbyist.
Part of the government team on the committee was Sebastián Negrón Reichard, the outgoing secretary of the Department of Economic Development and Commerce, or DDEC. His background is in economics and law, and he had experience as an adviser to the mayor of Boston on economic development and permitting reform. Attorneys Norberto Almodóvar Vélez and Héctor Morales Martínez, former director of the Permit Management Office, or OGPe, and president of the Puerto Rico Planning Board, respectively, were also members.
The remaining members are mainly officials from central government agencies and municipal governments. The task force did not include academics, professional associations, experts or entities that have devoted themselves to researching and overseeing permitting processes.
The permitting bills — Senate Bills 1173 and 1183, filed by Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz and Gov. González Colón — were merged into a 793-page substitute bill introduced June 23, a week before the end of the session, to create a new Planning and Permits Code. The vote on the bill was postponed until the next legislative session, which begins in August.
Urayoán Jordán Salivia, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Public Administration, said an integral and balanced permitting reform should have included experts in citizen participation, environmental management and public policy.
“It must be reckoned that permitting systems are not only legal or technical. They are also government processes that require coordination among agencies and safeguards to protect public values such as transparency and accountability,” said Jordán Salivia, a former president of the Public Administration Association. “An approach centered on the public interest and the common good must be the focus,” he added.
Jordán Salivia said that a person trained in public administration would have contributed a more systemic vision to the design and implementation of public-affairs reforms.
Geographer, planner and disaster consultant Marcos Quiñones Otero agreed that the Task Force lacks both the diversity of knowledge needed to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective and the expertise required to restructure planning and permitting processes.
“The approach taken in this permitting reform is one in which only specific professionals, from certain areas, were used, without taking into consideration how wide-ranging this reform is,” Quiñones Otero said.
The geographer added that scientific data is vital to crafting coherent and effective public policy.
Creating a Permits Code to compile provisions related to the granting of permits was one of the task force’s recommendations. Administration Bill 114, which initially proposed the Planning and Permits Code, is a “direct result” of the final report by the Permitting Task Force, the governor said.
“This code would be a legal instrument that consolidates in a single regulatory body all laws that delegate permitting evaluation and granting functions to different agencies,” the report says. “The Permits Code would allow these provisions to be harmonized, standardize the nomenclature used, eliminate contradictions and inconsistencies, clarify jurisdictions and establish coherent rules that standardize citizens’ experience when interacting with the permitting system.”
Studies of Questionable Reputation Taken out of Context
The Permitting Simplification Task Force based its analysis only on two reports to justify its recommendations. Both were either taken out of context or are ideologically biased.
The task force report cites data from the conservative Fraser Institute that identify Puerto Rico as the jurisdiction with the worst “economic freedom” in the United States. The concept refers to promoting an unregulated market economy, reducing the size of government and prioritizing private property. Fraser defines it as the ability to work, trade and enjoy private property with as few restrictions as possible, except those needed to safeguard the rights of others.
The Fraser Institute has been criticized for spreading false information about the climate crisis and pushing the privatization of essential services in other jurisdictions in the hemisphere. The Instituto de Libertad Económica in Puerto Rico, an organization that has participated in local forums on the permitting system alongside Government Efficiency Coordinator Verónica Ferraiuoli Hornedo, also uses Fraser Institute reports to support its views. The task force final report cites another document by the World Bank Group in which Puerto Rico ranks 143rd in the world, out of 186 jurisdictions, in terms of ease of getting construction permits, compared with the United States’ ranking of 24th. The task force report erroneously states that the United States ranks sixth.
Luis Jorge Rivera Herrera, an environmental planner and member of the Coalition for the Northeast Ecological Corridor, denounced in testimony submitted to the Legislative Assembly on the new Permits Code bill that “the task force report lacks minimal rigor, with unfounded and out-of-context premises that misrepresent the findings of the only two studies to which it refers.”
“House Bill 1213 adopts the conclusion of the task force report to justify and propose the amendments contained in this measure regarding the regulatory and governance structure of Puerto Rico’s current permitting system,” he added.
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In the environmental planner’s view, the World Bank Group report should not have been used to support such significant legislation because the institution itself warns that it cannot guarantee the accuracy or certainty of the data it includes.
The planner stressed that the report does not evaluate the permitting system as the only factor in determining how easy it is to establish and operate a business in a country or jurisdiction; it also uses nine other factors that were not included by the task force, such as electric service and tax payment, among others.
Rivera Herrera also noted in his testimony that the Fraser Institute identifies Puerto Rico as the worst U.S. jurisdiction in terms of economic freedom. The planner noted that, in Fraser’s report, Haiti ranks better than Puerto Rico.
“Given the interpretation made in the task force report of the Fraser Institute’s findings, one would then have to conclude, erroneously, that Puerto Rico should adopt Haiti’s development model to achieve a higher level of economic freedom than we currently enjoy,” Rivera Herrera argued.
The report draws on metrics about Puerto Rico’s permitting system, but it does not detail how they were produced or where they came from, the planner said.
The task force’s analysis was based solely on construction permits approved in 2023. However, it does not specify which agencies it is referring to.
No Verifiable Methodological Sources
Planner Héctor Rivera Mercado, president of the Puerto Rican Planning Society (SPP, in Spanish), also questioned the task force report as part of the hearings.
“The SPP recognizes that this report correctly identifies several operational problems in the current system: the fragmentation of processes among multiple agencies, the absence of effective technological integration and the lack of criteria differentiated by the complexity of procedures,” he said in his testimony. “However, [the SPP] has fundamental reservations about the task force process itself and about the way its findings were used to justify a reform of structural scope,” he added.
The planner noted that the task force proposes reducing waiting times for priority projects through a series of changes within the existing legal framework, which, according to Rivera Mercado, shows that laws do not need to be repealed to simplify the permitting system, as its barriers are mainly operational.
“The statements of motives for both bills cite statistics on processing times and delays without identifying verifiable methodological sources,” Rivera Mercado said. He cited a survey by the Puerto Rican Planning Society of 65 professionals with an average of more than 20 years of experience that revealed a lack of confidence in the validity of the figures used to justify the bill.
“Our opinion survey does not replace a technical study, but it does reinforce the need to demand greater transparency before approving a reform that substantially alters the way planning will be practiced in Puerto Rico,” the testimony reads.
Permitting Reform Proposes a “Philosophical” Shift
The task force report contrasts constitutional protections for natural resources with private property rights.
The report proposes a “philosophical refocus” in which public policy is redirected to “recognize the importance of citizens’ constitutional right to enjoy their property and the natural resources of our island.” Although the report appears to give both equal importance, the task force suggests changes to prior controls on “development” and land-use planning imposed by the current permitting system to prevent environmental damage.
“The government — in its exercise of state power, when legislating or regulating land use in Puerto Rico — has the obligation to allow and promote citizens’ enjoyment of their property, free of unreasonable or inflexible interference or impositions,” the report says.
The task force suggests that there is an imbalance of interests that tends to work against the enjoyment of private property and that existing preventive controls are excessive and problematic for economic development. It proposes “simplifying the environmental compliance process.”
Jorge A. Ramírez Portela | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The report recommends following urban development models from cities such as Houston and Miami. About Houston, it says the city “is guided by property rights, the availability of infrastructure and community agreements.”
“This system [Houston’s permitting system] — although not directly applicable in Puerto Rico — offers valuable lessons on respect for private property and on how public investment decisions can guide urban growth in a more organic and less regulated way,” it says.
Following this “philosophical refocus,” the bill for the new Permits Code would virtually eliminate the role of government agencies in issuing permits and reduce their role to enforcement. The task force proposed that “ministerial cases be automatically assigned to duly accredited Authorized Professionals, who will be in charge of their evaluation and adjudication.”
“The permitting system must offer certainty for those who invest, agility for those who start businesses and control for those who regulate. With what is proposed, we trust that we are moving toward a proactive, modern system that is consistent with the current needs of economic development,” Planning Board President Héctor Morales said during the presentation of the report.
Photo provided by the Senate
Pedro Saadé Lloréns, an environmental attorney and retired professor at the Environmental Law Clinic of the University of Puerto Rico School of Law in Río Piedras, said that interpretation explains why the Puerto Rico governor’s Planning and Permits Code “seriously weakens and, in some cases, eliminates environmental, archaeological and neighborhood protections, including the near elimination of environmental planning.”
Saadé Lloréns explained that, with the goal of materializing that mistaken constitutional vision, the proposals privilege “the interests that will benefit from Senate Bill 1183 (the proposed Permits Code) by protecting them from the alleged impairment of their private property rights” while “restructuring part of the government of Puerto Rico to group, directly or indirectly, countless regulatory and permitting powers and duties in the DDEC.”
Simplification That Reduces Environmental Review
Abel Vale Nieves, founder of the organization Ciudadanos del Karso, said the Permits Code before the Legislature will expand the number of projects that will not have to undergo environmental review, a mechanism that considers the significant impact a development will have on the environment.
“The reform does not stem from an environmental planning agenda, but from an economic acceleration agenda and reducing friction for projects, construction, businesses and developers,” Vale Nieves said. “The problem is that in Puerto Rico many of those frictions are precisely environmental protections, citizen participation, endorsements from the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the Planning Board and judicial review,” he added.
Jorge A. Ramírez Portela | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
According to the environmentalist and economist, the reform has focused on “dismantling environmental protections because those protections are viewed by the economic sectors promoting it as the main obstacle to rapid development.”
The task force’s recommendations also include making project proponents, rather than municipalities or government agencies, responsible for ensuring compliance with environmental public policy. The group also recommended expanding the allowable uses of existing zoning and land-use classification districts after studying planning models in countries such as New Zealand and Japan.
The report also suggests updating the Land Use Plan, known by its Spanish initials as PUT, a process that has already begun.
“The task force recommends that this process be guided by two fundamental principles: the principle of intensity in use — which establishes that government intervention, regulatory requirements and evaluation processes must be proportional to the intensity of the use associated with the proposed project — and the principle of predictability, which requires decisions to be based on clear and previously published criteria, eliminating excessive discretion and reducing risks to impartiality,” the report reads.
The document also urges making it easier to build on Common Rural Land, known by its Spanish initials as SRC, and harder to classify land as Specially Protected Rural Land, known as SREP. This recommendation is also included in House Bill 1113 by House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez, which would make it easier to build housing on land classified as Common Rural Land.
“In practice, multiple provisions of the bill could make it significantly harder for citizens and communities to challenge administrative actions even when legitimate doubts exist about environmental impacts, territorial risks or regulatory compliance. Public participation is not a procedural burden,” warned David Carrasquillo, a planner and director of the organization ¡Planifiquemos!
Carrasquillo said modernizing the permitting system requires harmonizing economic development, environmental protections, climate resilience, citizen participation and territorial justice. He said planning should not be replaced by speed, nor evaluation by automation.
The planner added that the permitting reform does not adequately address Puerto Rico’s climate realities, including coastal erosion, sea-level rise, water stress, flooding, and extreme heat. The term “climate change” is not mentioned in the task force report or in the permitting reform proposed by Puerto Rico’s governor.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
