Reviews on the fast track: a step-by-step guide to practices that States employ to streamline the environmental review process

Public Roads, July-August, 2003 by Cassandra Callaway Allwell

Three years ago, representatives from the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) met with conservation agencies and organizations to discuss partnerships for contributing to species recovery and ecosystem conservation within the State's short-grass prairie habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and Colorado Division of Wildlife agreed that preservation of healthy ecosystems to sustain viable populations of endangered species in key areas would be of greater benefit than remediation in the transportation corridor, located next to high-speed traffic.

This cooperative spirit and willingness to consider creative solutions, starting with species habitat needs and ecoregional priorities rather than project-by-project regulatory check-offs, ultimately gave birth to an innovative 36-species, habitat-based impact analysis and a focused conservation investment. High-quality, short-grass prairie habitats will be purchased in advance of highway construction projects as a mitigation measure to preserve the identified species that depend upon them. The short-grass prairie habitat under priority consideration is located in areas spanning from the Colorado-Wyoming border south to the Comanche National Grasslands, the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and the largest, multihabitat conservation site in far southeastern Colorado. The mitigation purchases will compensate for impacts caused by CDOT transportation improvements on the existing highway network located within short-grass prairie habitat for the next 20 years.

"It's challenging trying to balance the need to protect the environment while providing a safe transportation system for a growing State," says Tom Norton, executive director of CDOT. "However, CDOT is committed to doing just that. We recognize how important it is to preserve short-grass prairie and protect the wildlife dependent upon it."

The short-grass prairie initiative provides habitat mitigation prior to project development and construction for endangered and threatened species, therefore, reducing the time necessary for coordinating with the FWS. Reductions in coordination time will expedite the release of environmental documents and the issuance of the environmental permits necessary for project construction.

This Colorado conservation achievement provides an exceptional example of "environmental streamlining," which may be defined as "completing reviews and permitting in an efficient way, while ensuring that projects are environmentally sound." Since the enactment of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) in 1998, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has focused on reducing the length of time to process environmental documents for major transportation projects while remaining effective environmental stewards.

Streamlining entails establishing realistic timeframes for transportation and environmental resource agencies to develop projects, and then working cooperatively to adhere to those timeframes. The coordination of multiple overlapping environmental reviews, analyses, and permitting actions is essential to achieving realistic timeframes.

A number of Federal agencies are charged with statutory oversight of specific environmental resources. In addition, most States and some local jurisdictions have their own environmental statutes and requirements that also must be addressed. The complexity of the processes involved in developing transportation projects, the multiple actions, and the varying requirements do not lend themselves to quick solutions. But to streamline the process, sponsors at the regional, State, and local levels need to coordinate their timeframes and solutions.

Experience in developing and implementing streamlining solutions indicates that the most effective practices occur at the project level. Every State DOT has adopted or initiated processes and procedural agreements or initiatives that clarify, amend, or reinvent the development process for transportation projects. Because of these efforts, State and local highway and transit agencies have achieved considerable direct and tangible results.

Streamlining Practices in Action

Sponsors of transportation projects employ a variety of streamlining practices to speed up costly and time-consuming environmental reviews. Successful practices need not be innovative per se: they simply must be effective and efficient. Many of the successful streamlining practices fall into one of six categories:

1. Integration of planning and project development processes

2. Use of context-sensitive designs and solutions

3. Development of programmatic agreements

4. Use of flexible mitigation

5. Expenditures on technology, training, and staff

6. Employment of alternative dispute resolution

A review of these practices provides a step-by-step guide to environmental streamlining.

Integrated Planning

An integrated, concurrent process requires early involvement in the planning phase by State and Federal resource agencies, enabling them to provide their input on the purpose of the transportation project, the need for it, and the screening of preliminary alternatives. An example of a broad-based, integrated process is Florida's efficient transportation decisionmaking, which brings agency interaction forward into the early stages of transportation planning, identifies avoidance and minimization strategies much earlier, and builds cost impacts for these strategies into the long-range transportation plan.