Streetsblog Capitol Hill

When the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously passed a two-year transportation reauthorization bill last month, it quickly became clear that bipartisan support was coming at a price. First, we learned that the Transportation Enhancements bike/ped programs would lose their dedicated funding. Now, we learn that Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loans will no longer hold applicants to as high an environmental standard — or any standard, really.

TIFIA is a popular program, receiving $14 billion in loan requests despite only being able to loan about $1 billion in total this year. And under current law, the extent to which the project “helps maintain or protect the environment” makes up 20 percent of a project’s evaluation. In the EPW bill, the program is expanded by a factor of nine, but most evaluation criteria — including environmental protection — are omitted.

As Matt Sledge wrote in the Huffington Post:

Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst at U.S. PIRG, said he thinks [EPW Chair Senator Barbara] Boxer may have cut a bad deal. He argues that doing away with TIFIA’s selection criteria means the U.S. Department of Transportation will be forced to give money to any transportation project that meets bare-bones financial eligibility requirements [...] Toll roads, backed by private investors looking to make a buck off of “public-private partnerships,” will be first in line, he argued, since they have plans that are “just ready to go off the shelf.” [...]

Los Angeles hopes it will get some of that TIFIA money. Not so fast, Baxandall said. “Places like Atlanta and L.A. are hoping that the new bounty of TIFIA will allow them to finance public transit expansions, but they are likely to find the money already claimed by private toll road projects in places like Florida and Texas.”

An LA Metro spokesperson told HuffPo he’s still “pretty confident” they’ll get TIFIA funds.

It’s hard not to see this as a step backwards, despite the funding increase. It wasn’t long ago that transit advocates were celebrating an end to the Bush-era’s “cost-effectiveness-above-all-else” rule in the Federal Transit Authority’s New Starts program. Now, Baxandall says, “at a time when the nation’s transportation system is starved for funds and there is a consensus that dollars need to be spent more wisely, it is outrageous that the one program that would be massively increased would no longer try to deliver the best bang for each buck.”

The good(-ish) news is that there’s still time to make changes to the bill. The Senate Banking Committee still has to work on a transit portion, the Senate Finance Committee still has to figure out how to come up with another $12 billion, the whole Senate still has to debate it all, and the House still has to do… anything.

Highway projects can take 10 to 15 years from planning through construction. The length of the process leads to cost overruns, some due to inflation, some from having to pay engineers and contractors for years on end. No matter how you feel about the worthiness of road capacity expansion, if a project gets built it doesn’t do anybody any good to have that project cost twice what it ought to because of delays. Plus, reducing delays is going to be a key element in upcoming debates over cost-effectiveness in the transportation sector.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) has pressed the issue, insisting that the industry, together with government, must find ways to streamline to process to save money. He’s hinted that environmental reviews might, at times, be too burdensome.

Rep. John Duncan (R-TN) says U.S. projects take two to three times longer to get off the ground than other developed countries, and he chaired a Transportation Committee hearing today on project delivery delays.

Lawmakers and witnesses from transportation companies focused on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) as a cause of the delays. NEPA was enacted in 1970 and in many ways still serves as the foundation for environmental review policies throughout the nation.

Thomas Margro, CEO of Transportation Corridor Agencies, which builds toll roads in California, testified, “Our agency completed the first 51 miles of our planned 67 [mile] toll road system in 12 years. However, we have spent the last 15 years trying to accomplish and finish the last 16 miles, as it has been mired in the federal environmental review process.”

The first stage, to develop a Purpose and Need statement and the Alternatives for initial evaluation, took four years to accomplish, according to Margro. (Note: his written testimony says it took 28 months.) The second stage, preparing technical studies and environmental measures, he says, took six years.

In the end, the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed that the SR 241 project “would not likely adversely affect endangered or threatened fish species” but at the first hint of controversy, they backtracked. Margro says the process has failed them.

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Republicans on the Senate environment committee, who months ago began criticizing the Obama administration for evaluating federally funded infrastructure projects for their impact on climate change, today introduced legislation that would bar the White House from making climate a factor in environmental reviews.

The GOP senators said their bill was aimed at ensuring the government could not delay new road and power-plant construction to gauge its climate impacts under the precepts of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). That 40-year-old statute that requires local planners to conduct reviews of any transport project that could significantly impact the health of surrounding areas.

"As it stands, NEPA is subject to frequent abuse by radical environmentalists who want to use litigation to impose their agenda on federal agencies," Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), one of the measure's sponsors, said in a statement. "Our bill seeks to prevent that abuse."

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), responding to a petition from green groups, issued draft guidance in February that asked agencies to evaluate the climate impacts of new projects estimated to increase emissions by 25,000 metric tons or more of CO2 -- the same level that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used for its rule on mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas production.

As the EPA noted in its explanation of the 25,000 metric ton threshold, such a level of emissions would be equivalent to 4,600 new passenger cars or the energy use of 2,3000 new homes.

The CEQ's guidance is not set to become final until after a period of public comment ends next month.

Writing at the Heritage Foundation's blog, Nick Loris says that the White House's pending decision on whether to consider climate change in federal environmental reviews amounts to "more green tape."

Citing Republican senators' concerns that existing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements have caused lengthy delays in transportation project planning, Loris writes that adding climate change to NEPA will

guarantee that the billions in infrastructure spending in this stimulus bill will not be spent till years after the economy has already recovered. The money that will be spent in the near-term won’t be spent efficiently; it will be spent overcoming unnecessary regulatory hurdles ...

One wonders if Heritage would describe the three-year delay in San Francisco's planned bike lanes, caused by local bike critic Rob Anderson's request for a full environmental review, qualifies as an "unnecessary regulatory hurdle." Streetsblog San Francisco reported that the final price tag for the city's review topped $1 million.

Or how about the opponents of a car-free trial in New York's Prospect Park, who attempted to delay the project by pushing for an environmental review? Their efforts would hardly meet Heritage's definition of "green tape" promoted by environmental advocates.

Perhaps Loris would take a different position on the northeast corridor's failure to secure federal high-speed rail money thanks to the burdensome length of environmental reviews. Since Heritage had previously blasted the entire high-speed rail program as "fiscal waste on the fast track," the group might hail any "regulatory hurdle" that standing in the way of rail expansion.

The moral of the story: NEPA-mandated reviews can be utilized successfully by liberals, conservatives, green groups, highway boosters, and just about every constituency under the sun. That's an argument for streamlining the environmental review process, not eliminating it.

The Municipal Art Society came out with a report yesterday urging New York State to start analyzing greenhouse gas emissions in its environmental review process (SEQRA). MAS argues that the policy could be adopted without changing existing laws, which raises an interesting question to ponder on this Earth Day afternoon: Would the State Senate's latest MTA funding plan pass muster if it were subject to an EIS that factors in climate change?

The MTA rescue package does not, in fact, fall under the purview of SEQRA, even though it's probably the most important piece of climate policy that the state legislature will consider this year. The Senate's latest stab would keep the trains and buses running for a few more months, but it's an eco-stinker compared to the Ravitch plan and any other package that includes road pricing or tolls on currently free bridges.

Let's go back to the spring of 2008. Remember all the carping from Richard Brodsky and other state legislators about congestion pricing not going through the SEQRA process? That was regarding a policy projected to take 112,000 cars off the road each day. Now we have an MTA funding plan getting serious consideration that would create worse traffic bottlenecks and more incentives to drive, but so far not even a peep about environmental consequences from Albany.

The final draft of the Senate's economic recovery bill will require all projects funded by the stimulus to have approval under the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA. Sponsored by Barbara Boxer, the NEPA amendment (full text after the jump) was adopted late Thursday following Republican attempts to exempt highway projects from environmental oversight.

For advocates of green transportation, NEPA protection will help deter the construction of additional road capacity, but it does come with a potential downside.

The provision should assist the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, for example, in its fight against the widening of the Garden State Parkway, a project on New Jersey's stimulus wish list. The state has tried very hard to avoid federal oversight for this massive highway expansion project, going so far as to attempt funding it completely with toll revenue. Paying for the added lanes with stimulus cash should only be possible if the project can skirt NEPA.

While many are breathing a sigh of relief that the Senate fended off an end run around NEPA reviews, the application of 1970s-era environmental legislation could produce unintended consequences for deserving projects. Similar laws have been invoked to delay the implementation of San Francisco's bicycle network for three years and to impede car-free parks in New York.

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