A site selector screening 30 communities has days to cut the list to five or seven. Lindsey Cannon of Quest Site Solutions wrote in August 2026 that a strong site can be eliminated when its information is poorly organized or impossible to evaluate quickly.
South Dakota's Governor's Office of Economic Development publishes guidance (February 2023) telling communities that one-day turnarounds are not unusual, and that a generous process might allow a week or two. The Site Selectors Guild's 2024 site-readiness forum reported the same compression: RFIs now require answers in days.
A tier-3 ED team of three to eight people cannot build a custom research package for every inquiry and still meet those windows. Cities that answer fast with verifiable documentation win screening rounds against cities holding comparable assets and no filing system. The difference is retrieval time, and retrieval time is a function of what was assembled and verified before the inquiry existed.
Assembling it requires knowing which evidence is reusable across project types and which evidence cannot exist until a prospect supplies project-specific inputs. What follows draws that line across six screening dimensions.
Two kinds of evidence
Reusable evidence describes fixed or slow-changing attributes of a site and community. Parcel dimensions. Zoning designations. Environmental assessment status. Utility infrastructure maps. Workforce occupation counts within a commute radius. Permitting timelines from comparable approvals. These facts do not change because a food manufacturer asks instead of a metals fabricator. Assemble once, verify, file for any response where they apply.
Project-triggered evidence exists only after a prospect supplies specific requirements. A utility load study sized to a particular peak demand. A training commitment letter tailored to a specific occupation mix, headcount, and start date. An incentive resolution structured for a particular capital investment and job count. A wastewater discharge compatibility determination based on a particular effluent profile. The defining inputs come from the project. The city cannot generate them.
A previous Playbook piece on counterparty mapping drew a related distinction: what can be pre-authorized by the utility, the treatment plant, the planning department, and the college, versus what requires a project profile before those counterparties can respond at all. The framework here extends that logic into a filing system.
Each screening category below separates into three layers. Reusable items get assembled once, verified, and maintained permanently. Project-triggered items are built per inquiry. Pre-stageable items also live in the permanent library, but they are tools rather than answers. They compress the time required to produce project-triggered evidence once the inquiry arrives.
Sites and environmental condition
Reusable. Parcel boundaries and acreage. Control documentation: ownership, option, or listing agreement with price terms. Current zoning and comprehensive-plan designation. Boundary and topographic surveys. Wetlands delineation. Phase I environmental site assessment, and Phase II if completed. Cultural resources and protected-species reviews. Geotechnical findings. FEMA flood mapping. Aerial photography. Utility-location maps showing service points. Access road and rail-spur proximity.
Virginia's VBRSP Site Characterization program (December 2025 guidelines) requires most of these and organizes them into four map classes: aerial/environmental, utilities, development constraints, and schematic buildout. SiteOhio (accessed August 2026) requires developable acreage, industrial use, site control, utilities with adequate capacity, Phase I/II environmental, geotechnical, wetlands, cultural resources, endangered species, and agency concurrence. FAST NY (February 2025) enumerates a similar list. If your site qualifies for any of these programs, the certification package is itself a reusable evidence set.
Those programs also mark the practical screening threshold. A site missing Phase I, geotechnical, or wetlands work is likely eliminated before anyone calls you, because the selector cannot determine buildability from what you have published.
Project-triggered. Whether the prospect's building footprint and process layout fit the parcel. Project-specific grading or stormwater design. Conditional-use or variance findings tied to the proposed operation. Air permits, discharge permits, or hazardous-material approvals required by the specific process.
Pre-stageable. A one-page parcel data sheet with the decision-relevant facts extracted from the underlying reports. A constraints map. A summary of each due-diligence finding in language a non-engineer can evaluate in 60 seconds, with the full report available as a linked attachment. An approval-path summary showing which permits the site already holds and which require project-specific application.
Power
Reusable. Serving utility and delivery point. Service voltage available at the site boundary. Line sizes and system maps the utility permits you to share. Rate schedules. The utility's extension process and cost-responsibility rules. The protocol for requesting a load study, including typical turnaround and required inputs.
The Guild's 2025 infrastructure panel told communities to prepare detailed, site-specific infrastructure data before an RFI arrives: line sizes, rate structures, system maps, extension plans, upgrade information. That is the reusable layer, and it is the whole of it.
Project-triggered. Everything that follows from the prospect's peak kW or MW, monthly kWh, operating schedule, voltage requirements, phased ramp, redundancy needs, and requested service date. The load study. Cost allocation for any required upgrades. The service plan and commercial terms. A capacity reservation if the utility offers one.
Pre-stageable. A named utility contact authorized to respond to project inquiries, with an agreed turnaround commitment. Response windows compress to a single day (South Dakota GOED, February 2023), so that commitment has to be measured in days. The specific number is a negotiation with the utility; the ceiling is set by the RFI. Also: a standard project-input form listing the fields the utility needs from the prospect, and a written statement from the utility separating existing available capacity from capacity that requires a study.
That last item defines what you can assert in a response and where you must write "study required upon receipt of project specifications." Conflating the two puts a commitment in the utility's mouth that it has not made.
Water and wastewater
Reusable. Water and sewer line maps showing sizes and locations relative to the site. System pressure. Treatment plant capacity, both permitted and current average flow. Published local pretreatment limits. Surcharge rules. The identity of the permit authority. The infrastructure path from the site to the collection system.
Without documented treatment capacity and pretreatment limits in the reusable library, a site will not pass wastewater screening. The selector has no basis to judge whether the prospect's discharge is even plausible.
Project-triggered. The prospect's average and peak flow. Process versus sanitary split. Biochemical oxygen demand and total suspended solids loading. pH, temperature, and any sector-specific pollutants. The publicly owned treatment works' determination of categorical status, discharge compatibility, pretreatment requirements, sampling conditions, and surcharges. Any plant or collection-system upgrades the discharge would require.
Pre-stageable. A standard industrial-discharge intake sheet listing the parameters the treatment plant needs from the prospect. A named plant contact and escalation protocol. Current local-limit documentation. Model language distinguishing unused hydraulic capacity from acceptance of a particular discharge. The first is a reusable fact. The second is a project-specific determination that only the plant can make. A response that blurs them creates exposure for the treatment authority and credibility risk for the EDO.
Workforce
Reusable. Occupation employment counts and median wages for your labor shed, sourced from BLS OEWS data (May 2025 estimates, released 2026) by SOC code. Annual completions by CIP code and award level from IPEDS (2024–25 survey), covering every institution within commute distance. SOC codes are the federal taxonomy for job categories; CIP codes are the federal taxonomy for education programs. Both are standard in site-selection data requests. Existing training programs and apprenticeship structures. Institutional contacts.
The reusable workforce library answers one screening question: whether this labor market contains the occupational base and training infrastructure a project in this sector would draw from. It cannot answer whether you can train 85 CNC machinists by Q3 2028. That answer depends on inputs only the prospect holds.
Project-triggered. The employer's occupation mix, hiring totals, shift structure, wage rates, required credentials, equipment, and production ramp schedule. The community college or workforce partner's response: committed seats, instructors, equipment, funding source, curriculum pathway, first-cohort start date, first-completion date. A previous Playbook piece on college partnerships covered the mechanics of getting that response in a form that survives screening.
Pre-stageable. A standard employer staffing worksheet that captures the inputs the college needs. A commitment-letter template pre-cleared by the college's academic and administrative leadership, with blanks for project headcount, occupation mix, calendar, and constraints. A named official authorized to sign training commitments. The program-development pathway showing how long it takes to stand up a new program versus expand an existing one.
The pre-clearance is the part that matters. A template still requiring internal review at the college when the RFI lands has not been pre-staged.
Permitting
Reusable. Current zoning and by-right uses for each marketed site. The distinction among site-plan review, conditional-use permit, variance, and rezoning, and which path applies to which use categories. Responsible agencies at local, state, and federal levels. Submission requirements, notice and hearing steps, board calendars, fees. Documented timelines from comparable past approvals: actual elapsed days, not the statutory maximum.
The elapsed-days figure is worth the archival work. A statutory maximum of 90 days tells the selector what the law allows. An actual median of 34 days across three comparable approvals tells the selector what to expect. The second is the number that survives screening.
A community that cannot say which approval path a proposed use falls under fails the permitting screen before timelines become relevant at all.
Project-triggered. The determination of which approvals the specific operation requires. Whether local, state, and federal reviews can proceed concurrently or must sequence. The resulting critical path tied to the company's design and construction calendar.
Pre-stageable. A permit matrix mapping common industrial uses to their required approval paths. Agency contact protocols. A completeness checklist for each approval type. A sample critical-path schedule from a comparable past project, identifying details removed, timeline intact.
Incentives
Reusable. The statutory or program authority for each available instrument: abatement, PILOT, TIF, grant, loan, training subsidy. Eligible costs and activities. Administering body. The scope of staff discretion versus what requires board or council action. Notice and hearing requirements. Board and council meeting calendars. Affected taxing jurisdictions and their required concurrence. Precedent agreements, redacted if necessary, showing structure, terms, and performance conditions.
A previous Playbook piece on incentive screening covered what the incentive question actually tests at the screening stage. The reusable library should answer that test: what instruments exist, what they can cover, how long approval takes, what the precedent terms look like. If a community cannot describe its instruments with eligibility criteria and at least one precedent case, the selector has no basis for estimating a value range or an approval timeline.
Project-triggered. The estimated value based on the project's specific capital investment, jobs, wages, and taxable property. The actual approval resolution or agreement. Performance milestones, disbursement schedule, clawback provisions.
Pre-stageable. An instrument inventory with calculation models that accept project-specific inputs. The approval calendar showing the next available meeting dates. Precedent term sheets. Model resolution language. And a written statement separating an indicative estimate, which the EDO can produce on its own authority, from an authorized award, which requires a governing-body action the EDO cannot pre-commit.
The two-layer package
No universal file format standard exists across site selectors or certification programs. Virginia's VBRSP (December 2025) prescribes application organization and attachment numbering. South Dakota's GOED (February 2023) specifies Word or PDF, ten pages or fewer, one megabyte or less, with short paragraphs, headings, bullets, and tables. FAST NY (March 2023 Track C instructions) requires a PowerPoint for one grant track. Those are program-specific requirements, not general standards.
The practitioner sources do converge on a two-layer structure.
Layer one: the response summary. Clearly labeled maps. Concise data sheets. Standardized headings matching the RFI's question sequence. The decision-relevant conclusion extracted from each underlying study. Cannon's guidance is direct on this point: an evaluator reviewing 30 sites will not read a 40-page geotechnical report to find the one sentence saying the site can support a 200-PSF floor load. Extract the sentence. Put it where the evaluator finds it in ten seconds.
Layer two: the supporting evidence. The full engineering, environmental, utility, zoning, and agency records behind those conclusions. Available as attachments, linked or indexed so the evaluator can drill down when a Layer-one answer raises a question.
South Dakota's guidance (February 2023) recommends roughly one page per topic in the response summary, with lengthy utility letters and technical reports summarized rather than inserted whole. That is a workable standard even when no state program imposes a format requirement.
Maintain both layers for every element. The Layer-one extracts are what you drop into a response package. The Layer-two documents are what you attach when the selector asks you to prove it.
What this framework does not cover
This piece draws the line between reusable and project-triggered evidence. It does not address how often reusable evidence should be refreshed or what triggers an update: rate schedule changes, zoning amendments, new environmental findings, workforce data releases. SiteOhio's three-year recertification cycle and Virginia's tiered re-evaluation suggest the cadence. The operational details of evidence expiration belong to a separate piece.
It also does not address a problem raised in Issue #5's failure taxonomy: what happens when a city misreads a coordination failure, such as a utility contact who did not respond in time, as an evidence failure. The reusable library solves evidence failures. Pre-staging protocols reduce coordination failures. Sorting your materials into the framework above will at least tell you which of the two you have.
South Dakota's RFI guidance (February 2023) includes one line worth quoting directly:
"Maintain a master response document so that when an inquiry arrives, you duplicate the file and remove what does not apply rather than building from scratch."
Under that approach, GOED estimates 90% of the content is ready before the inquiry exists. The remaining 10% is project-triggered. The 90% has to be verified, current, and formatted so a selector can evaluate it without calling to ask what it means. The 10% has to have a production path short enough to fit inside whatever window the prospect gives you.
- Environmental report shelf life: Virginia's VBRSP accepts a Phase I ESA completed within five years for site characterization, but ASTM E1527-21 limits transaction reliance to 180 days from acquisition with a one-year information window, which means a reusable library's environmental work may satisfy a state program while failing a buyer's due-diligence standard.
- Power readiness as separate investment: New York's $300 million POWER UP initiative awarded its first $38.9 million across four projects in April 2026, treating electric deliverability as a distinct infrastructure layer that general shovel-ready certification does not prove.
- Incentive importance vs. elimination power: The Site Selectors Guild's 2026 Pulse Check found only 2% of respondents cited incentives as a current top elimination factor, even though Area Development's separate 2025 consultant survey still rated them financially important — a distinction that should shape where incentive evidence sits in your response sequence.
- Wastewater screening thresholds: EPA defines a Significant Industrial User to include noncategorical dischargers at 25,000 gallons per day of process wastewater or 5% of a POTW's dry-weather capacity, and local limits are designed around each plant's specific receiving waters and treatment constraints, which is why your reusable library needs the actual local-limit schedule rather than a generic capacity number.