Pedal to the meddle

Pedal to the meddle Officials push to cut red tape, speed project delivery times.

      The Federal Highway Administration has set a new goal to cut delivery time for highway and bridge projects in half, Administrator Victor Mendez told state transportation officials on March 3.
      A typical highway project can take from 10 to 15 years to complete ' up to six years for the environmental review process and up to nine years for planning, design and construction, according to transportation planners. Transit projects face similar bureaucratic hurdles.
      The FHWA's 'Everyday Counts' initiative is an effort to convey urgency to agency staff and speed up the approval project for construction projects receiving federal aid, Mendez said at a conference held by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials in Arlington, Va.
      The Department of Transportation has several internal teams studying ways to improve the planning and environmental process. Mendez said the intent is to speed up technical reviews without undermining the environmental process.
      Legal or legislative impediments need to be identified and communicated to the proper authorities to see if they can be removed. There may not always be a solution in such cases, 'but at least we've done what we can to elevate the issue and try to resolve it,' Mendez said.
      The multiyear transportation spending bill proposed last year by Rep. James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, includes a provision requiring the DOT to establish an Office of Project Delivery to shepherd and track projects through the approval pipeline so they don't languish.
      There's no reason an environmental impact statement for a project should take up to two years to complete, said Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., during a mid-January forum at the Center for National Policy.
      Overregulation, he said, strangles government's ability to make meaningful changes.
      When questions were raised last year about whether infrastructure projects could generate jobs quickly enough to be considered for the stimulus act, Rendell told the Obama administration and Congress that states would shorten the time contractors had to respond to a bid from 120 days to 30 days. Businesses quickly adapted to the shortened time frame when money was on the line, he said.
      The effort to dredge the Delaware River several feet deeper to handle large containerships is another example of regulation gone amuck, Rendell said. One reason that project has stalled is environmental concerns the dredging could impact sturgeons that had moved into the river several years ago. He pointed out that the sturgeon population has continued to increase in conjunction with ongoing dredging and blasting to maintain the river at its current 40-foot depth.
      He also provided the following anecdote from his term as mayor of Philadelphia to highlight how regulations are used by some as a straight jacket on development: 'I once had a Justice Department lawyer when I was mayor threaten to sue me because we were building a municipal parking lot and the elevators did not have Braille. And it was a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
      'And I said to the lawyer, 'Do you realize this is a parking lot?' I said, 'There's no retailers, nothing. The only reason you get in that elevator would be to go up to your car and drive your car out of the parking lot and onto the street.' And I said, 'The last time I checked, we do not allow people who are blind to drive cars. So the only reason a blind person would be in that elevator is if they were with somebody else, a sighted person who was taking him up to get in the car and drive it out. So there's no need for Braille in the elevator. Why would we possibly need Braille in a parking lot?' So I said, 'Sue me.' I said, 'You might put me on the cover of Time magazine.' '
      At the National Governors Association meeting on Feb. 21, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels pleaded with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to help streamline project reviews and approvals. After complimenting the FHWA for accommodating Indiana's requests to try more efficient contracting procedures, Daniels said the DOT should go further.
      'Throw the rule book out or suspend it temporarily during the economic emergency. And watch what the states can do. We're not going to build an unsafe bridge. Nobody will. But we can build it a lot cheaper and quicker if we had fewer hoops to jump through,' he said.