Re: Plan Review question
This may be redundant to what I wrote above, but I get lots of large chain-store submittals that have been built in other cities (presumably) according to the submitted plans. I do a complete review, and often have tons of corrections. I don't believe that my correction requests generally fall into the category of local amendments, generally the plans have flaws that may or may not have been caught when submitted to other jurisdictions.
I ignore any claims of "pre-approved" plans that have been approved elsewhere. I don't know if someone is trying to pull on over on me, or the plans have never been reviewed by a competent plan reviewer, but ultimately, they get a thorough local review by me prior to approval.
In answer to your original question, I don't see any value (to the applicant) for having any kind of multi-city or pre-approved plans, since each jurisdiction should perform their own review. The only exception to this might be adjacent jurisdictions that have an interlocul agreement for projects of this type, and have an agreement to similar code interpretations/compliance. Perhaps if a smaller (understaffed) jurisdiction adjacent to a larger one both had Target stores coming, they could arrange this, but in general, what's the point or value?