Application approval rates, caseload, and processing times

Application Approval Rates, Caseload, and Processing Times, First Quarter

The Board's executive director reported on the performance measures for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007 (July 1 to September 30, 2006). Some of these measures are described below, broken down into three categories: approval rate, caseload, and processing time. For the complete list of performance measures, please refer to the Board minutes from the public meeting on October 20, 2006. Minutes are available on the Board Meetings page.

Approval Rate

The Board approved good cause exceptions for 83.53% of the applications it closed in the first quarter. Of these approvals, 85.66% were approved under an expedited review, and 14.34% were approved after the applicant appeared at an administrative hearing.

Caseload

In the first quarter, the Board received 809 requests for a good cause exception. Once the Board staff receives a request, it sends an application. For the same time period, the Board received 500 good cause exception applications.

Processing Time

For the cases closed in the first quarter, the Board made a decision in an average of 79.01 days. That figure includes the time applicants spent providing documents that were missing from the initial application submission. The Board actually spent 50.10 days processing applications that were closed in the first quarter; this figure includes only the time spent handling an application and does not include the time it took an applicant to submit missing information.
The average processing time—that is, the average amount of time when the application was in the Board's control—from receipt of application to expedited review was 18.82 days; 63.61% of applications had an expedited review within 20 days (processing time).
For the cases that had an administrative hearing, 66.67% were heard within 60 days of the expedited review, with an average of 57.33 days. (As of November 7, 2006, hearings were being scheduled within one month of the expedited review.) For the cases that hearings, 43.59% were decided within 60 days of the hearing. (The Board recently created a full-time position for a hearing officer in order to reduce the wait time between a hearing and a Board decision.)

Questions?

For more information about the good cause exception process, please see our Application Process and FAQs pages. For questions about these statistics, please contact Matthew A. Scheller, Executive Director, at [email protected] or (602) 265-3747.