White House Panel
Recommends
Easing Regulations for Developers
JOHN HEILPRIN / AP 24sep03
WASHINGTON—A White House task force recommended Wednesday that federal agencies make it easier for developers and the government to avoid lengthy project-specific environmental studies often blamed for holding up projects.
In a 90-page report, the group calls on several federal agencies to create categories of projects, using broad criteria, that would be deemed to have no environmental impact. If a project fit into one of those broad categories, no further environmental assessments would be required, officials said.
Other recommendations include drafting new federal regulations for managing fisheries, forests and other resources and creating a citizen's guide to help people better understand the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality convened a group of 11 federally employed experts on NEPA, including two members of the White House council's staff, in May 2002 to study how agencies put into the law into practice.
Other members of the task force include NEPA experts from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the departments of Commerce, Energy, Interior and Transportation.
The Bush administration has blamed NEPA for bureaucratic gridlock. Signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, NEPA is used by environmentalists to limit development on public land and force protections for endangered species.
Council Chairman James Connaughton said the report was intended to "modernize the paper process" and improve the way government considers environmental factors in planning and decision-making.
"I'm hopeful you're going to find that this is a lot of just good old-fashioned basic good management practices," Connaughton told reporters. "In sum, we're looking for a more effective and a more timely NEPA process that is more collaborative, (so that) government can be more efficient in doing these reviews, and therefore have more resources available to do the reviews even better."
Council officials said opponents could still challenge an agency decision to categorize a project as having no environmental impact at the time that finding is made.
Robert Smythe, an ecologist who publishes a newsletter for the Natural Resources Council of America, an environmental group, said he was disturbed by the recommendation that federal agencies create broad categories of criteria under which projects could be exempted from having to conduct detailed environmental impact analyses.
"That's the one section of the report that gives me most pause," said Smythe. "Why do we need to open the door to more categorical exclusions?"
A Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that creating more exclusions could allow more projects to avoid environmental reviews.
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