- Comprehensive plan
- A jurisdiction's adopted long-range land-use vision (also called a general or master plan) against which discretionary requests are judged. A project consistent with the plan argues from strength; one requiring a departure hands opponents a principled objection independent of the project's technical merits.
- Discretionary approval
- A land-use permit that requires a political body to affirmatively vote yes (such as a rezoning, special-use, or conditional-use permit), as opposed to a by-right use that must be permitted if it meets objective code standards. Discretionary approvals carry political risk because the deciding body can say no for non-technical reasons.
- Incidence
- The question of who actually feels a benefit or bears a cost. Because project costs are concentrated on nearby residents while benefits like general-fund tax revenue are diffuse, matching a benefit's incidence to the burden's incidence, local, visible, attributable, is what makes it politically effective.
- Payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT)
- A negotiated fixed payment that substitutes for standard property tax, offering the jurisdiction budget certainty and legibility. A well-structured PILOT can read as fairness, a dependable annual check, in a way a raw abatement, which reads as a giveaway, does not.
- Rate-payer trap
- The political vulnerability created when the cost of transmission and generation to serve a large new load is socialized across a utility's rate base, raising ordinary customers' bills. It is disarmed through cost allocation, committing publicly and contractually to fund one's own interconnection, transmission, and generation.
- Reputation account
- The cumulative standing a developer carries across a portfolio of projects. Because opposition networks share tactics and precedents across jurisdictions, conduct in one county sets the terms of hearings in the next, making each project a deposit or withdrawal that affects the whole pipeline.
- Veto point
- Any step in the entitlement path, staff review, planning commission, governing-body vote, or a specialized overlay, where a single body can stop or condition a project. The more veto points a path contains, the higher the risk, because opposition organized at one node carries to the next.