Municipal Permit Evaluation System

A permit application arrives with applicationType and zoneType plus the measurable facts the rules test: buildingHeight, squareFootage, safetyScore, and environmentalImpact. The applicantInfo, propertyAddress, and projectDescription objects ride along for record-keeping but are not evaluated by any rule.

Before any rules run, five booleans classify the application: isResidentialZone, isCommercialZone, and isIndustrialZone each combine applicationType == 'building' with a zoneType check, while isOutdoorEvent and isIndoorEvent pair applicationType == 'event' with a location value. Precomputing these flags keeps the approval table readable, since each row can reference one named flag instead of repeating the two-part condition.

Zone-specific approval criteria live in one first-hit table whose first column holds inline expressions over the classification flags. Residential rows pass at buildingHeight <= 35 with squareFootage < 5000 and safetyScore >= 80, and flip to 'Conditional' with a variance requirement above 35 feet. Commercial rows allow up to 100 feet under 20000 square feet with a safety floor of 85, isIndustrialZone rows are always 'Conditional' pending environmental assessment, and events split at 500 expectedAttendees for outdoor or a 90 safety score for indoor. Near the bottom, any application with safetyScore < 75 is 'Denied' outright, and the empty final row leaves everything else 'Pending' for manual review.

The 35-foot cap reflects a genuinely common residential height limit in municipal zoning codes, roughly two and a half stories, while the higher commercial allowance and the escalating safety floors (80, 85, 90 as risk grows from residential to industrial) are sensible tiering rather than any specific statute. Routing over-height buildings to a variance process instead of denying them mirrors how zoning boards actually handle nonconforming proposals.

Final disposition comes from crossing initialApprovalStatus with environmentalImpact under a first hit policy. An 'Approved' application stays approved only when impact is 'minimal'; 'moderate' impact downgrades it to 'Conditional' with an 'environmental_review' next step, and conditional applications with moderate impact escalate to 'comprehensive_review', appending ' and requires environmental assessment' to the carried-over statusReason. The 'significant' row denies either status outright, and the 'Denied' and 'Pending' rows pass their statusReason through unchanged so earlier reasoning survives to the response.

Making environmental impact a gate that can only hold or worsen the outcome, never improve it, matches how discretionary permitting works in practice: environmental review is a required clearance layered on top of zoning compliance, not a factor traded off against it. The graded next steps, from 'standard' through 'comprehensive_review', give the intake team a workload signal in the same pass.