Adoption of a compiled determination is won at a state legislature, not sold to a building department

What was held

That the way to get a compiled determination accepted is to make the trade attractive enough to a jurisdiction — transfer the official's personal risk, keep the department's fee revenue whole, and let a class of review leave their desk. Six operational levers, all of them addressed to a municipality. The adversarial review had carried the admission for two revisions that adoption incentives were unmodelled, and it was right.

What was done

Read the adoption record rather than reasoning about it. Four transplants of the Singapore engine, the cross-case study of what governs adoption, and then a search for whether the trade has ever actually been offered in American law.

What came back

It has been offered, and it is nineteen years old. Florida Statute §553.791 lets an owner or contractor use a licensed private provider for plans review and inspections in lieu of the local building department, with statutory insurance minimums, a twenty-business-day clock, and a 2025 amendment expressly permitting automated review. Federally, delegated agencies have approved manufactured-home designs since 1976. And the structure of the Florida statute inverts the sales problem: the applicant elects the provider and the jurisdiction may not charge extra or delay, so consent was obtained once at the legislature rather than municipality by municipality. Separately, the transplant record shows four jurisdictions given the checking engine for free and none reaching production, against a study finding eight of twelve governing variables are non-technical — so a strategy that lowers encoding cost plays four of twelve.

What it cost

Two things. The claim that nobody had offered a jurisdiction this trade, which was this project's stated reason the position was unoccupied — it was offered, and what is actually unprecedented is narrower: a determination that is type-based and travels between jurisdictions rather than project-based and confined to one. And the first customer, who is no longer a building department but a legislature, which is slower, more political, and outside the operator's stated competence. It also concedes that the information-first ordering is incomplete: the wedge is informational, the standing that makes it pay is legislative, and no document here plans for a legislative capability.

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