Those who have worked on the permitting and environmental review for a federally funded infrastructure project know the challenges that exist in coordinating with numerous agencies that may have oversight over a project. A project may need clearances from the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Defense… the list can become daunting — not to mention the high chance of review delays due to needing to coordinate review with so many agencies with heavy workloads.

Thus, the Administration’s commitment to modernizing the permitting process is welcomed news. This goal took a step closer to reality last week when the White House Office of Management and Budget and Council on Environmental Quality issued a new Guidance Establishing Metrics for the Permitting and Environmental Review of Infrastructure Projects to 11 federal agencies to provide clarity for reporting and tracking permits and environmental review timelines using the Federal Infrastructure Permitting Dashboard. Two important goals of the guidance are 1) increase the transparency involved in the permitting and review process, and 2) facilitate faster review timelines by encouraging early coordination and synchronization of agency review schedules. Other admirable goals of the program are improving consistency with the reviews conducted by different agencies, which would also be welcome news for project owners, not to mention taxpayers, in hopefully reducing redundancy during the review process, and collecting data to determine whether the these reviews do indeed result in reduced environmental impacts.

Reporting to the Permitting Dashboard is required as of Oct. 12 and will include infrastructure projects, including:

• all highways, rail and transit projects,
• airport capital improvement projects,
• water resource projects,
• renewable energy generation,
• stormwater infrastructure projects and
• certain projects involving broadband Internet.

While the federal lead agency is responsible for ensuring that the necessary information is posted to the Permitting Dashboard, it is important for agencies receiving federal grants to be aware that the lead agency does have the discretion to delegate responsibility for the posting of information to cooperating agencies, including federal contractors on the project team.

Days after the rollout of the new guidance, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 348, the Responsibly and Professionally Invigorating Development Act of 2015, or the RAPID Act. While the level of “invigoration” one can obtain from going through the permit and environmental review process on a federally funded project is a whole separate blog posting, the issue of striking the right balance between environmental review and keeping a project moving forward is, and will continue to be, an important policy topic — especially when you have situations where two comprehensive environmental laws may be in in play on a large public project, such as the National Environmental Protection Act and the California Environmental Quality Act.

In the interests of efficiency and cost reduction, we hope to see these efforts to streamline and modernize the review process produce positive results, rather than adding another unneeded and potentially confusing (interpreting how and what information should be posted on the Permitting Dashboard) layer to the existing review process. Just like we all remember from our early school years, no one likes unproductive busy work.