America’s process for permitting infrastructure is a convoluted mess of federal, state, and local procedures, regulations, bureaucracies, lawsuits, judges, activists, and landowners. “Getting approval from all of them, getting every single box checked, is the biggest hang-up to getting projects up and running,” says Cary Davis of the American Association of Port Authorities in a video making the case for reform.
The flaws of the process spare no one: a couple gets threatenedwith fines for wanting to build a home on their property in Idaho, construction of badly needed housing projects is blockedin California, a Canadian company is stopped from building an oil pipeline to Nebraska, utility companies are stymied in improving electricity supply through upgrading transmission lines, and wind and solar farms are killed in Ohio.
Bipartisan dissatisfaction with permitting has produced some recent legislative reforms and proposals — the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, the BUILDER Act, parts of which were included in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, and the Energy Permitting Reform Act introduced in July. These are encouraging signs. The problem is that none of them go far enough. What we need is to rethink the permitting procedure from scratch.
Read more in The New Atlantis here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
