Local governments are the backbone of industrial development - through zoning codes, they determine where, when, and how anything gets built.

Today, data centers are landing in cities whose zoning codes never imagined them, and local governments are scrambling to respond. They need months of work before a single line of new code gets drafted - that means comparing their code with other cities, checking for consistency with state law, and more.

We built Verdant Code to compress months into days. We automate the sourcing and the analysis so cities spend their time on judgment instead of data retrieval. Long-range planning work that used to take a six-figure consultant engagement now happens in-house as cities intended.

Data center development is a symptom of a larger problem with America's industrial base. Local governments run the code and permitting decisions that gate industrial development, but they run them on decades-old workflows. Local governments spend $11B a year on this work, yet development stalls anyway.

American zoning codes have not caught up with American innovation. It's time for that to change.