It’s Amazing Anything Ever Gets Built Federal Permitting is a Mess. Even a Pet Obama Wind-power Project has been Stuck for Years. By John Engler And Sean McGarvey
http://www.wsj.com/articles/its-amazing-anything-ever-gets-built-1432682700
America’s business and labor leaders agree: President Obama and Congress can do more to modernize the permitting process for infrastructure projects—airports, factories, power plants and pipelines—which at the moment is burdensome, slow and inconsistent.
Gaining approval to build a new bridge or factory typically involves review by multiple federal agencies—such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Interior Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Land Management—with overlapping jurisdictions and no real deadlines. Often, no single federal entity is responsible for managing the process. Even after a project is granted permits, lawsuits can hold things up for years—or, worse, halt a half-completed construction project.
Consider the $3 billion TransWest Express, a multistate power-line that would bring upward of 3,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity from Wyoming to about 1.8 million homes and businesses from Las Vegas to San Diego. The project delivers on two of President Obama’s priorities, renewable power and job creation, so the administration in October 2011 named the TransWest Express one of seven transmission projects to “quickly advance” through federal permitting.
Yet it has languished under federal review since 2007. Late last month the Bureau of Land Management announced it had finished a voluminous environmental impact statement, but construction is not expected to begin for almost another year due to problems obtaining permits from the EPA, the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. Meanwhile, thousands of skilled craft construction workers sit on their hands.
That isn’t to say the administration hasn’t tried to streamline the process. President Obama’s Jobs Council has examined how other countries expedite the approval of large projects. Australia used to be plagued with overlapping layers of regulatory jurisdiction that resemble the current structure in the U.S.
But then some Australian states implemented reforms that have made a difference. New South Wales now prioritizes permit applications based on their potential economic impact, and agreements among various reviewing agencies ensure that projects are subject to a single set of requirements. As a result, permitting times have shrunk, the Jobs Council reports, from a once-typical 249 days to 134 days.
President Obama has heeded the advice. In 2011 the administration created an interagency council—between the Office of Management and Budget and the Council on Environmental Quality—dedicated to streamlining the permitting process. The White House also launched an online dashboard to track the progress of select federal permit applications.
It has become clear, however, that congressional action is needed to make these improvements permanent and to require meaningful schedules and deadlines for permit review. Fortunately, Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) have introduced the Federal Permitting Improvement Act.
The bill would require the government to designate a lead agency to manage the review process when permits from multiple agencies are needed. It would establish a new executive office to oversee the speed of permit processing and to maintain the online dashboard that tracks applications.
The bill would also impose sensible limits on the subsequent judicial review of permits by reducing the statute of limitations on environmental lawsuits from six years to two years and by requiring courts to weigh potential job losses when considering injunction requests.
Americans of all stripes know that something is seriously wrong when other advanced countries can build infrastructure faster and more efficiently than the U.S., the country that built the Hoover Dam. The Portman-McCaskill bill is a bipartisan opportunity to strengthen the administration’s efforts, improve the permitting process, and begin the task of renewing America’s infrastructure.
Mr. Engler is president of the Business Roundtable. Mr. McGarvey is president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions.
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