Turn conditions of approval into an obligations register

1 · Learn the move · Recipe pattern

An approval arrives with conditions, and the conditions are where the entitlement is kept or lost. A condition is an obligation with a trigger, a party, a deliverable and sometimes a deadline, but it is written as one sentence of planning prose, and half of them lean on another document: 'as required by the County Engineer', 'prior to issuance of the first certificate of occupancy'. Filed as a PDF, they are forgotten until an inspector asks. The recipe turns each condition into a row you can own: split compound conditions, name the trigger as written, name who must act, name the deliverable, and copy any timing exactly. On a phased plan, add one more field: which building or phase the trigger attaches to, as written, because 'prior to the first certificate of occupancy' can put the whole site's off-site work on the first building you build on spec. The step that protects you is the last one. Every time a condition points to a standard, a study or an official's discretion that is not in the approval document, the register says so with [NEEDS: ...], because the obligation is not knowable until that record is in hand. The model never computes a deadline from an approval date and never states that a condition has been satisfied. Satisfaction is what the county records, confirmed by counsel.

Follow these steps on the approval letter below. 1) Number every condition as written. 2) Split any condition with more than one obligation into a, b, c. 3) For each, fill TRIGGER | PHASE AS WRITTEN | WHO ACTS | DELIVERABLE | TIMING AS WRITTEN | DEPENDS ON | STATUS. 4) TIMING and PHASE are quoted, never computed or assumed. 5) Where a condition relies on a document not pasted, DEPENDS ON reads [NEEDS: that document]. 6) STATUS is OPEN for every row. [approval letter]