The Unnecessarily Cumbersome, Opaque, and Often Wildly Costly Permitting Process

Eakinomics: The Unnecessarily Cumbersome, Opaque, and Often Wildly Costly Permitting Process Today’s title is a quote taken from Dan Goldbeck’s recent paper, A Look at Infrastructure Permitting Reform Efforts, Past and Present, in which he notes that there is no paucity of discussion about infrastructure spending in the United States but “Lacking in that discussion, however, is consideration of one of the most inefficient aspects of building out new infrastructure projects: the unnecessarily cumbersome, opaque, and often wildly costly permitting process.” Streamlining the approval and permitting process is a perennial topic of conversation (remember “shovel ready" projects in the Obama-era stimulus bill?). But Congress has actually made efforts on this front, so it is useful to check in on its success and appraise what is left to be done. The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015 contained a framework to consolidate inter-agency coordination and provide greater accountability for the time taken to permit a project. One aspect of the implementation is the Permitting Dashboard website, which includes the Federal Environmental Review and Authorization Inventory (Inventory),"a database that ‘includes a brief description, identifies the activities or circumstances that trigger the review, the sectors and project types to which it could be applicable, and the underlying statutes and/or regulations.’" The latest version of this inventory includes 62 potential permitting requirements for a project, of which AAF can find information for the time and cost for 43 of the requirements in Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) data. A dozen of these could apply to any given project. Using these, one can get a rough sense of the magnitudes involved. As Goldbeck summarizes it: “Combined, these ICs [information collections] include 30.4 million annual hours of paperwork with $1.6 billion in total costs.” That is a lot of time and money. Of course, not every project will face every requirement. You might get lucky and face the “roughly 12 minutes for the ‘Notice of Proposed Construction or Alteration, Notice of Actual Construction or Alteration’” or draw the short straw and be saddled with “600 hours for the ‘Applications and Reporting Requirements for Incidental Taking of Marine Mammals by Specified Activities Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.’” In any event, there appears to be much more work to be done on the streamlining front. Goldbeck argues that such work should be guided by three primary principles. In his words: Coordination. Relevant federal and state agencies unnecessarily collecting and analyzing redundant information does little, if anything, to mitigate harmful outcomes while increasing the time and money involved in approving a project. Efforts to improve coordination can involve: more clearly defining each agency’s role in a given permitting process, establishing better cross-agency information sharing practices so that stakeholders need only submit required data once, and building a more collaborative relationship with relevant stakeholders. Accountability. The core point of permits and other government approvals is to preemptively hold potential contractors accountable for potentially harmful outcomes, but it is often overly cumbersome for said contractors to hold the relevant agencies accountable for inappropriate actions or inactions. Establishing a framework that addresses this dynamic can help in terms of better allocation of resources both during and after the process in question. Transparency. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to comply with a permitting process if the requisite steps and expectations are not clearly understood by the applying party. Clearly providing greater information on the rules of the road and of the rationale behind an agency’s particular decision on a specific item are crucial parts of making the process more transparent. There is a lot more to a successful infrastructure initiative than simply deciding on the top-line spending. One of the most important is increasing the bang-for-the-buck by speeding projects to completion.