Permitting Efficiency Isn't Just About Regulatory Reform
On teams and technology
Today, Green Tape is publishing its third guest post, authored by Peter Bonner. Peter Bonner is a public, non-profit, and private sector innovator, working at the crossroads between these sectors in the areas of human capital, workforce development, leadership effectiveness, and operational excellence. He is a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in guest posts do not necessarily reflect the official position or views of Green Tape.
It took one federal land management permitting team two years to complete an environmental impact statement for a mineral extraction project on federal lands. Another team working on the same type of project – similar complexity, governing regulations, community interests, and geographic footprint – took just three months. Why?
One reason is that these permitting teams differ widely in occupations, permitting experience, project management processes, and the technologies used to support their work. Federation of American Scientists (FAS) research reveals that these variations play key roles in long timelines, costliness, and permitting process dissatisfaction.
Fortunately, positive change is within reach.
The reduction of federal permitting requirements as a result of the President’s Executive Orders promise to speed up energy and infrastructure permitting. But new regulations and agency policies alone will not solve talent and process challenges.
The composition of federal permitting teams; the technologies used to execute, manage, and track work; and the skill sets needed in this new permitting world will continue to present barriers to getting permits done and projects started. Agencies should take coordinated and deliberate action to fix these issues.
People and Process Deficits Impede Permitting Efficiency
The approach to forming permitting teams varies. Some agencies employ small dedicated permitting teams in regional or state offices. Others form ad hoc teams that come together for a permitting project and then disperse back to their home organizations. Some use a hybrid approach, pairing a portion of permanent permitting staff with others who come in and out of permitting projects based on the skill sets needed.
Methods for managing processes, technologies, and guidance are also highly variable across agencies. Some agencies centralize permitting processes, providing technology support and staffing guidance to permitting teams in the field. Other agencies decentralize permitting, managing the process out of bureaus, offices, regions, and state organizations with little coordination among them.
These variables and others (e.g., project ownership, complexity, range of regulatory authorities, permit types, geographic footprint, etc.) are not often considered when defining the best approach to tackle a permitting task. But they play a vital role in determining permitting outcomes, leading to delays and cancelled projects, or progress and project success.
FAS research found that agencies often do not have a systematic process for creating teams nor a standard method for documenting the performance of staffing and management decisions. Decisions are seldom based on empirical data — often due to a lack of available data — or best practices learned through agency sharing. However, in our research, we met with one program manager who restructured their team to drive efficiencies based on historical workload data, which highlights a critical opportunity.
Technology Deficits Impeding Permitting Efficiency
Project management software, databases that enable fast document retrieval, integrated GIS platforms to visualize potential environmental impacts, and standardization in permitting project data elements can all help permitting teams make better decisions. However, the challenges that plague the deployment of permitting technologies parallel those impacting permitting staffing and processes.
There is little coordination within or across agencies for the support and deployment of these technologies, and few pathways for sharing effective practices or making them interoperable. The lack of consistency in data standards and guidance on data classification leads to a diffusion of support tools, driven by unique agency or sub-agency teams and specific permitting goals. The Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) was a key partner in this research on permitting technologies and modernization pathways, and they have created an inventory of how these tools are used today.
If permitting teams can make more informed, data-driven decisions faster at key points in the permitting process, they can deploy people more efficiently and speed up the process.
The Permitting Council and individual agency initiatives have spurred pockets of innovation by investing in improved technology tools through interagency funding. Greater sharing across these initiatives and others can improve deployment and realize efficiencies.
People and Technology Opportunities to Improve Permitting Efficiency and Outcomes
To resolve these challenges and take advantage of the regulatory reforms taking shape, our research suggests a number of actions the Administration and agencies can take now:
Use the Permitting Council to better coordinate, disseminate information, and provide insight on permitting team effectiveness and efficiency through more consistent workforce and technology practices.
Empower the Chief Environmental Review Permitting Officers (CERPOs) in each agency to set standards for permitting team configurations, define consistent workflows, and support tools.
Continue investments in permitting technologies starting with sharing the best-in-use permitting technologies teams are using today in case management, GIS, project management, workflow, and document retrieval to support teams in making better decisions faster; develop a consistent NEPA taxonomy and data standards and to guide this work.
Create communities of practice within and across permitting agencies and permitting/infrastructure sectors for problem solving so that agencies innovate on how to best organize permitting teams.
Pool resources and workforce actions within and across agencies to ensure teams have the right training, technology and skill sets.
See more in our recommendations for the permitting workforce and how to improve permitting technology deployment.
As agencies implement regulatory changes to expedite permitting, changes to how they staff and manage teams as well as deploy technologies will have an enormous impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of permitting. Energy and infrastructure projects will get started faster, and the American people will see and reap the benefits of their tax dollar investments.
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Excellent article on a very complex subject. You've touched on all the major internal organizational points.
In perhaps a future article, you may want to deal with some of the outside permitting process risk factors, which you've touched on with the recommendation of leveraging "best practices" and "historical data" as internal practice but now adding the need for a forward looking "scouting" effort in order to expose potential delay problems.
Here, and at the top of my own list is the need to develop an early and comprehensive take on the regulatory and approval process potential pitfalls as presented by the governing authorities' own capabilities and manpower constraints, which greatly vary. Additional exogenous forces impacting approval schedules would be the current backlog of competing projects requiring government approval.
Making an early effort to get a good understanding of these influences will be rewarding in setting more realistic schedules and hence, budgets.
As one who has labored for decades in the trenches of large EPC industry project management teams, more recently having been involved in domestic utility transmission & distribution and BESS energy projects, I have seen quite a variation in permitting requirement as our project needs transited from one jurisdictional area to the next.
Best always,
Ed Burns
Peter, it would help if you would share the details of the two projects. I acknowledge that organizing production is important, but I do wonder about the three months to an FEIS. Let's take the three months or 90 days. At least 45 of those are gone for the required comment period, which leaves 45 say 20 for the DEIS and and 25 for response to comments and final. But those days, unlike the comment period include weekends. What about cooperating agency requests, consultation with various regulatory agencies? It would be interesting to compare the two projects in greater depth.