Just Being in Arizona Will Slow Your Permit, a Pipeline across Alaska Needs Less Permits than a California Restoration Project, and Other Fun Facts
At EPIC, we’re compiling information about what slows permitting because we really shouldn’t be burning through ⅓ of a project’s funding on permitting.
5 Fun Facts about Permitting
1. Just being in Arizona will slow a 404 permit, according to a quantitative analysis by Ulibarri and Tao (2019) who analyzed 285 Clean Water Act 404 individual permits (for wetland and stream impacts) in the Southwest US (the Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco USACE Districts). The factors that were found to be statistically significantly associated with longer permitting times were: being in Arizona (even slower than being in California), being a business or local government (as opposed to faster timelines for state and federal government permittees), and requiring an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) rather than an Environmental Assessment (EA) under the National Environmental Protection Act. The researchers noted that of the states researched, Arizona had the “second most environmental and health protections of southwestern states” (behind California, and tied with New Mexico). Overall, the average time to get a 404 permit - for all project types (development, transportation, environment and others) - was 426 days (1.2 years), almost a third of the time it takes to get a wetland mitigation bank approved (1,099 days) according to EPIC’s forthcoming research.
2. You know what doesn’t slow permits, according to data? Workload. If you’re saying, What?!?!?, I am too, but at least for the 285 permits in the Southwest US that Ulibarri and Tao (2019) analyzed, staffing was not statistically related to slower permit approvals. The authors speculate that regulators were able to adapt to their workloads and had appropriate staffing and processes.
3. You know what slows permitting, according to people? Workload. Research based on informational interviews by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI, 2020) about mitigation bank and in-lieu fee program approvals, and earlier research by Ulibarri et al. (2017) about permitting of four environmentally-beneficial projects point to lack of staffing as a top factor of slow permits. Ulibarri et al.’s paper included a literature review and interviews with 13 permitting practitioners in California. The following is a sample of factors slowing permitting: staffing, permittee or regulator lack of experience or subject matter expertise, lack of attention by agency leadership, complex projects needing multiple permits experienced cascading delays, inconsistent interpretation by regulators decreased permittee’s understanding of expectations, use of novel methods or technology faced increased information requirements, high profile projects &/or risk averse regulators required more information than an applicant could reasonably provide, a permittee’s poor compliance record, and feedback provided late in the project required more costly and lengthy project redesign. The interviewees from ELI’s research echoed the factors above and added issues with decisions not being consistent, aspects of the IRT review slowing the process, and lack of accountability and transparency. You know who has great permitting transparency? Virginia DEQ! Go check our blog on their new Permitting Evaluation and Enhancement Program (PEEP).
4. An 800-mile Pipeline across Alaska Requires Less Permits than a Restoration Project in California. Ouch. Multiple permitting requirements are in the extreme in the Public Policy Institute of California’s (PPIC) 2021 report on Advancing Ecosystem Restoration with Smarter Permitting. The report highlighted two case studies (Elk River Recovery Program and McCormack-Williamson Tract) that required 16 and 25 permits, respectively. To contrast, I picked the first active project on the FAST-41 permitting dashboard (a federal permit streamlining program for $200M+ projects that meet certain criteria). The Alaska LNG project includes an 807-mile liquified natural gas pipeline, a 63-mile gas transmission line, a gas treatment plant, and an LNG terminal.
Permits for an 800-mile pipeline across the entire state of Alaska: 15. Alaska LNG
Permits for a river restoration project in Humboldt County, California: 16. Elk River Recovery Program
5. A Beaver Doesn’t Need a Permit, but a Beaver Dam ‘Analog’ Needs Multiple. As one anonymous survey respondent noted in a 2022 American Rivers white paper on Low Tech Process Based Restoration, “For such a simple and low-cost project like this, the permitting process is often time-consuming, excessive, and expensive. The wetland delineation can sometimes cost more than the project itself.”
That’s enough crazy for today. We will continue to dive into research and reports on opportunities to streamline permitting of restoration projects. More soon!
“If the resource remains degraded or is lost over time because the restoration project was not permitted, then the environment has not been appropriately protected.”
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