PermitNotebook Research

PermitNotebook Research is the byline on PermitNotebook's guides, research pages, and rule-tracker entries: work produced through the verification process described on our how we verify page. It is not a person, and it is not a staff of writers. We do not publish headshots or biography pages for a research team, because there is no team to describe honestly. PermitNotebook Research is a collective byline. It names the process behind a page, not an invented person.

Editorial responsibility for everything published under this byline rests with Mario Bailey, PermitNotebook's founder. If a page under this byline is wrong or out of date, it is on Mario Bailey to fix it.

How the verification behind this byline works

Every page under this byline starts from primary official sources, read at the time the page is written rather than pulled from memory or a prior draft. Every fee and statute claim carries a verbatim quote from that source behind it. Anything we cannot confirm from an official source is marked as unconfirmed or left out entirely; we do not guess. The full method, including how we rate confidence and handle corrections, is on the how we verify page, and the sources we draw from are listed on the sources page.

What review actually catches

Research is checked before it publishes, and the check is not a formality. The recurring failures are specific and boring: a threshold that does not appear in the quotation supplied to support it, an expedited-processing fee recorded in a size-threshold field, an exemption written up with the opposite verdict, and a figure whose unit measures a different dimension than the column it landed in. We also re-read quotations character by character against the page they cite, because a passage assembled from two columns of an HTML table, or spliced across two pages of a long PDF, reads perfectly and is not what the source says.

When a check fails, the finding is dropped or the row is left unresolved. A tidier comparison table is never worth a number that cannot be checked against its own source sentence, and where a jurisdiction publishes nothing we say so rather than infer from the model code, which five of the last nine jurisdictions we researched had amended or deleted outright.

What carries this byline

You will see PermitNotebook Research on the Library's guides, on our research pages, and on the rule tracker, which logs the fee and statute changes we catch while re-verifying pages. If you spot an error in something published under this byline, please tell us and we will fix it and update the date it was last checked.