Highway to Bureaucratic Hell
http://www.wsj.com/articles/highway-to-bureaucratic-hell-1442012349
Why it takes six years to build a road in America. And how to do it faster.
Anyone who rattled down highways replete with moon craters while traveling on Labor Day weekend knows: The government doesn’t excel at managing roads. A major improvement would be bulldozing a permitting process that delays new public-works projects for up to a decade, and a new report from the nonpartisan group Common Good offers a road map.
In 2009 the Obama Administration air-dropped $800 billion of taxpayer cash known as the stimulus package, but as of last year a piddling $30 billion had been spent on transportation infrastructure. One reason the projects proved not as “shovel ready” as promised is that proposals must undergo extensive environmental and permitting reviews, which leave no tedium behind in part to avoid litigation.
No single official oversees the process, and agency turf wars are the norm. A project must comply with every federal, state and local outfit that declares itself relevant—Fish and Wildlife, the town fire department. A desalination plant in San Diego, for example, kicked off a permitting adventure in 2003 that lasted nine years and endured 14 legal challenges, which makes California’s failure at drought relief less of a mystery.
Another illustration is the Bayonne Bridge that connects New Jersey to Staten Island and at 150-feet tall blocks large cargo ships. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey plans to raise the bridge height to 215 feet instead of blowing $3 billion on, say, a new tunnel. As a reward for that rationality, it took six months to identify the lead agency for an environmental review that dragged on for some five years. The regulatory jibber jabber spanned 20,000 pages and included traffic flow studies for a bridge that already exists.
One irony is that delays mean more carbon energy use. Roughly 6% of energy pumped out for public consumption is wasted thanks to America’s superannuated electricity grid. That works out to about 200 coal-burning power plants, the study notes. The same is true for congested roads, on which motorists guzzle gas in traffic while they wait the average six years for a major highway project to be approved.
The expense adds up: A six-year delay on public projects costs more than $3.7 trillion, the report found. By the way, the amount needed to update dilapidated bridges, water pipes and so on over the next decade is half that, at $1.7 trillion.
Common Good suggests building a process that shuttles projects through in a prompt two years. Environmental reviews should be handled by one designated official and kept to 300 pages; litigation should be restricted to the first 90 days after the permit is issued; the White House should be granted authority to appoint an agency as a “one-stop-shop” for interstate projects.
Congress could address the permitting morass this fall as part of the transportation bill, and the presidential candidates could include the issue and a horror story or two in their agendas for faster economic growth. It’s hard to imagine a more sensible and politically achievable idea—and one better suited to restoring public confidence that government can carry out its basic duties.
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