At a recent roundtable with New York executives, Heather Briccetti Mulligan remembers the frustration of a businessman who compared trying to file a permit for a $200 million construction project with ordering a pizza.

The pizza could be tracked by phone from the moment it was ordered to its arrival at his door, Mulligan, head of the Business Council of New York State, recalls the executive saying. The permit, on the other hand, “went into a black hole.”

“’There’s no one I can call,’” she remembered him saying. “’I don’t know when it’s going to be looked at. I have no idea if there’s anything wrong with it. And there’s no timeline.’”