Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO) has added his support to the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) proposal to update the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Graves, the ranking member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, submitted his comments to the White House’s CEQ to affirm his support for modernizing the NEPA to more efficiently handle proposed transportation and infrastructure projects’ environmental reviews, without harming those environmental protections.
“The current NEPA regulations were put in place decades ago to help protect the environment, and while our infrastructure needs, technology, economy, and society have all significantly changed in countless ways since then, NEPA has not,” Graves said. “As a result, projects that would otherwise benefit our infrastructure, safety, and in some cases, the environment itself are often delayed or stopped in their tracks. I commend the Trump Administration for finally proposing to bring our NEPA regulations into the 21st century.”
Calling the system “fundamentally broken,” Graves said in his letter that an estimated $400 billion in infrastructure investment have to go through the NEPA process. And those reviews take on average four and a half years to complete. Some, he said, take longer. Delays, like one he cited in his letter which took 14 years to get approval for light rail, increase costs for projects, which in turn reduces the amount of resources available for other projects.
Graves said he supports CEQ updates, which would put in place more practical NEPA review timelines; add reasonable, flexible limits to the size of environmental documents; focus on coordination between stakeholders and federal agencies, and get rid of outdated sections of environmental regulations to make them easier to handle.