Yes.
The portal submission, Portal Recon, will allow agents to give feedback on potential portals in their hometown (once set, this location CANNOT be changed). Additionally, you are also given a bonus location. Unlike your hometown location, this can be changed once a year.
Idk for sure but the last 50 or so reviews i have done in OPR are a “rough estimate” 15% under 50 miles radius and the rest are all over the country(usa). Some in mexico and i don’t understand spanish(but use translate and maps to try to verify). This is a dear to my heart issue, i love OPR, Ingress and Pogo. I use s2 cells for submissions, study all map info they use and help update my area on open street maps. There is no easy solution but imo there’s not enough rewards outside the eventual creation of a local portal/pokestop to perpetuate the continuing honest reviews of portals. I fear the current backlog and future backlog pogo is gonna create.
It could also be that approval be tied with a physical presence, sort of like a proposed spot should be accessible in game but sort of deactivated (say not yet functioning as a stop or gym) and will only become an active stop when a predetermine number of access is reach like 100 accumulated access or 20 unique player access, then it will become a pokestop. When someone want the spot to be promoted into a gym, another set of access is needed like additional more or additional unique player access.
That way, Niantic could be sure that a set number of actual people are interested on that spot, actively used it and a high probability that it would be of good use from there on.
I also like the sort of remote player submitting or approving spot but of course the local ones are the most familiar of the area.
Nothing with money that RUINS it for legal kids
Niantic paying you to check submissions?
In MONEY?!
Everybody would abuse the living cr*p out of this
Niantic, I’m ready to volunteer! 
Just for the love of the game, no salary needed…
I guess we all know by now that they are - currently - planning to get them approved through OPR… I fear this will absolutely flood the system, since it already is an issue now (or at least has been).
In order to make this work without annoying Ingress players to death (I don’t know many, but they HATE PoGo players), they could just copy the OPR platform, change it to a PoGo theme and open it to PoGo players (maybe level 35 and up). POI could still be synced back and forth from game to game, but Niantic must stop this forced Ingress dependency, especially with a third game coming that will use this data.
Rewards for checking submissions would be nice, but could also lead to abuse, so I’d rather not see any rewards.
There’s also a bigger issue and that is the criteria it must meet.
In many new areas there is virtually nothing that is submittable that fits the criteria, nothing historical, nothing with a cool story, no gathering places, no parks, no churches, no art, etc. These new areas however may have a neighbourhood shopping centre with no signage there except the signage promoting each business and the shopping village itself, but these don’t meet the criteria.
In old small towns a similar issue is present, in some small towns, a pub may be the only place people can gather besides their private homes, these places may have no signage around that meets the criteria so they end up with no stops as pubs are rejected.
Ultimately as much as it’s nice that submissions are coming to pogo, it means nothing if Niantic does not widen the acceptance criteria to allow a broader range of signage.
People without transport aren’t going to walk 3km to a spot that just has 1 stop afterall.
There should be some sort of a reward. Rewards are given for doing everything in the game so why not for submissions and reviews. And they can be anything Niantic decides. I’d like coins the most because the current system of getting coins is stupid. Coins should be given for doing something else in the game and not just when you’re lucky to have players kick out your Pokemon from the Gym after some time.
In ingress, the reward for an approved submission is 1000 action points and 1 key for that portal. 1000AP can be gathered in normal game play just by throwing 4 resonators on an empty portal (which can take 8), and the key is easy to obtain. So it isn’t really worth much.
No 1000AP is very much
They could add a medal for number of discovered locations. I really dont get why you so badly want a reward for this…
and @KingQ07 for level 10 you need 4 million AP. 1000 really is nothing. Id say its worth about the same as 300XP in PoGO…
No it takes me 1 hour to get 1000ap and 3 minutes to get 300xp
Then you are doing it really very wrong…
But this is going OT. I would suggest you google for Ingress leveling tactics 
I just think it’s logical to get something. I don’t expect anything big, a little amount of stardust is more than enough.
What is ap
Why would you need a reward to approve Pokestops. That concept is just asinine, approving stops would benefit all players (nearby, items, eggs, gifts, XP) so why would anyone need any more reward than that.
The fix is to allow higher level Pokémon Go players to approve stops, give a medal for approvals of stops that actually get made into stops, and have the higher medals count hold more weight in stop approval. No need for extra incentives beyond that.
Until you have reviewed the asinine, don’t hate on wanting rewards for the free labor. Which is what opr tends to be. I agree… gungho for weeks but the weeks turn to months of crap and occasional local stuff and the love is lost a good bit. I want my new portals and pokestops but i hate hours and days of grindy work and nothing happening. I see stuff i approved months ago sit in limbo, good portals not entering the system. Not becoming pokestops. Just sitting…
I wouldnt need a reward.
But a small reward would definetly speed up the process .