A reviewer on Amazon.com the other day said:
"I...would like to voice my concern regarding the direction that King and a few others are driving the Section 106 process. Several of King's other recent publications give me grave concern.... particularly "Places that Count" and "Saving Places that Matter." The former includes what I feel is a drastic push on the concept of TCPs that ends up trying to redefine the very intent of NHPA and what kinds of places are supposed to be protected. The second volume comes across mostly as a lay person's manual on "how to use Section 106 to derail any development you happen to disagree with." Both directions have serious ramifications for those of us involved in the protection and understanding of the archaeological record. I sincerely hope that anyone purchasing this book, Especially teachers considering this as a course manual, take this perspective into consideration, as it is very relevant to Cultural Resource Management and archaeology in general. "
I was naturally curious as to what the (anonymous) reviewer was upset about, and wondered if others were similarly concerned, so I reprinted his/her comment on the ACRA-L Listserv (ACRA standing for American Cultural Resources Association) and invited him/her and others to elaborate. What’s resulted so far is a series of queries and comments, some on-list, some off. I thought it might be useful, or at least mildly entertaining, to reprint them here and respond to them. Unless the author explicitly authorized me to reveal their identity, I’ll keep the notes anonymous. Here’s the first one:
“I know you were very active in the development of this process. I'd be interested in hearing what the ideas were at the very start when the 106 process was being created. Beyond the usual understanding of the need for protection, who came up with the idea and just how did NHPA get started? I've always wondered but never really found anything that explains it very well. Usually it is just snippets of information and I would like to understand the thought processes of the founders, so to speak.”
Let me start with a couple of clarifications. First, the writer treats “NHPA” (the National Historic Preservation Act) and its Section 106 process as though they’re the same thing. They’re not. There’s a lot more to NHPA than Section 106, and the Section 106 process is not in the law itself; it’s in regulations issued by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) that direct agencies in how to implement Section 106. Second, I wasn’t at all active in the development of NHPA; as an undergraduate anthropology student at San Francisco State College (now University), I learned about NHPA around the time it was enacted. I learned about it from Eric Barnes, a remarkable fellow student who, unlike us starry-eyed “New Archaeologists,” was interested in the actual application of federal laws; I learned a great deal from Eric. The only archaeologist who was significantly involved in the development of NHPA – and this is, of course, germane to the Amazon reviewer’s point – was the late J.O. Brew of Harvard. As for the Section 106 process, I’ve been involved in its evolution, but it, too, was created before I became significantly involved in the federal system.
I should also mention at the outset that Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion of NHPA’s origins and development; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Historic_Preservation_Act_of_1966.
Now: the thought processes of NHPA’s founders. The central idea behind NHPA was the general perception of social value in old things – particularly old buildings and neighborhoods, and famous battlefields. This idea that had been developing in the U.S. since the late 19th century, and had taken hold rather earlier in Europe, notably in Revolutionary France. The U.S. had taken a stab at giving this perception statutory form in the Historic Sites Act of 1935 – John Sprinkle at NPS is writing a series of papers about this statute and what it produced, to which I recommend the reader’s attention.
The New Deal, World War II, and the post-war establishment of programs like the interstate highway system and urban renewal seriously altered the relationships between the U.S. government and the citizenry. Notably, the federal government became involved in clearing “slums” to “renew” the cities, in building hydroelectric and flood control dams and reservoirs, and in building high-speed highways through the countryside. While most of these programs were welcomed by most people, it came pretty quickly to be recognized that they had their destructive sides. This was the other idea behind NHPA – that the destructive side of federal government activities ought to be controlled somehow.
NHPA itself was the creature of a task force set up largely by the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with support from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and generally sponsored by Lady Bird Johnson as part of her highly effective effort to beautify the U.S. and build up protections for its environment. This in turn was part of President Johnson’s “Great Society” program. There was a White House conference, a study tour of Europe to see how its nations were handling their historic (mostly architectural) heritage in the wake of World War II, and a modest coffee-table book called With Heritage So Rich – which is well worth reading even today. WHSR, toward its end, outlined a piece of legislation that became NHPA. The book was published in 1965; the bill was enacted in 1966. Those were the days.
The “founders” – the authors of WHSR and the legislation – were mostly historians, architects, and community-based historic preservationists. Archaeology got rather passing mention. The founders were, however, pretty convinced of the social and cultural importance of preservation. They bemoaned the destruction of old neighborhoods by highways and urban development – not just because it meant the loss of fine architecture but because it destroyed the ambience, the character, the soul of the community. I quote some of the founders about this sort of thing in some of the books my Amazon reviewer finds offensive.
What the founders were about in enacting NHPA was really two things. First, they wanted to create a system by which historic places – defined from the very beginning as “districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects” significant in “American history, architecture, archaeology, and culture” (“engineering” was added later) could be recognized and given consideration in planning at all levels of government. The vehicle they selected to effect this purpose was a national register of historic places. There had been a list of “National Historic Landmarks” since the 1930s, but these were the Great Places, the places of putative “national significance.” The new National Register was to be more populist; it was to include places important at the national, state, and local levels. Nobody, I should acknowledge, was thinking about tribes, and the tribes weren’t making themselves known to historic preservationists.
The second thing the founders sought to do was to force federal agencies not to destroy historic places willy-nilly; this led them to include Section 106. Section 106 originally said that agencies were to take into account (i.e. consider, think about) the effects of their actions on places included in the National Register, and give the ACHP – also created by the law – an opportunity to comment on such actions. Later, the law was amended to apply to properties eligible for the Register but not yet listed.
There was some discussion in congress as to where the new historic preservation program should be lodged – in the National Park Service (NPS) or the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The fact that HUD was a strong contender of course reflects the importance the founders ascribed to the recognition and protection of historic urban neighborhoods, and to urban and regional planning. It is interesting to consider what might have happened had the program wound up in HUD, but it didn’t; it went to NPS, where it was overseen by three important men – arguably the real “founders” of the NHPA program. Earnest A. Connally was a professor of architectural history from the University of Illinois; he became the head of the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. William Murtagh (the only one of the Big Three still alive and well [I hope] today) was a historian and Vice President of the National Trust; he became the first Keeper of the National Register. Robert R. Garvey, Jr. also came from the National Trust, where he had been its Executive Secretary. He had no academic credentials; he had been a Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II (Guadalcanal), developed a thriving popcorn vending business in North Carolina, and run Old Salem, a collection of relocated historic buildings in the same state. Garvey became Executive Director of the ACHP, and in the mid-70s led it out of NPS into independent status – another whole story.
Bill Murtagh is a great guy, and I had lots of respect for Earnest Connally, but I think the architectural, professional, academic stamp they put on the program was unfortunate. I also think that lodging the program in NPS was regrettable, though probably unavoidable; it automatically imposed a sort of educational, interpretive character on the whole operation. Had the program wound up in HUD it might have become much more community-based, with a more sophisticated take on planning. But it went to NPS, and the rest, like they say, is history.
Let’s stop for now with a reflection back on my reviewer’s concern about “the protection and understanding of the archaeological record.” That concern, while deeply important to him or her, and to me, for that matter, was not central to the interests of NHPA’s founders. Some of the founders were concerned mostly about architecture, some about grand themes in American history. Some – perhaps most – were concerned about holding onto the character of American communities, as expressed in their buildings and neighborhoods. In one of my books – Places That Count – I argue that the founders were substantially concerned about protecting what decades later we would come to call “traditional cultural properties,” that is, places important for the roles they play in maintaining community identity. My reviewer apparently finds this premise disturbing.
In the next segment, I’ll look at how archaeology came into the mix of disciplines dealt with under NHPA, and how it achieved its rather dominant role in modern Section 106 practice.
Tom King’s CRM Plus -- Ruminations on "cultural resource management," environmental impact assessment, and related esoteric topics, by a curmudgeon who seldom has anything good to say about anything.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Look Out for "Thirteen Bones"
A bit of Spam for myself here, particularly for anyone who wonders what happened to Amelia Earhart (and her navigator, Fred Noonan) when they disappeared over the Pacific in 1937. My novel, Thirteen Bones, will published in October/November by Dog Ear Press (yes, an on-demand self-publishing outfit; I got sick of being rejected by the "legitimate" houses). It tells the story of the discovery of Earhart's bones on Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands in 1940 by colonists from Kiribati and Tuvalu. The skeleton of the story (as it were) is factual; what I've done is to weave a tale around the historical and archaeological data.
Earhart, I should say, makes only a cameo appearance; the story is told mostly from the viewpoint of an I-Kiribati (Tunguru, "Gilbertese") boy who discovers the first of the bones, and partly from that of Gerald B. Gallagher, the administrator of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. The data upon which the story is based are, of course, from the ongoing work of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR; see http://www.tighar.org/). Profits from publication (if and when they develop) will be shared with TIGHAR and with the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), the Kiribati government program that seeks to protect the island group of which Nikumaroro is a part.
Earhart, I should say, makes only a cameo appearance; the story is told mostly from the viewpoint of an I-Kiribati (Tunguru, "Gilbertese") boy who discovers the first of the bones, and partly from that of Gerald B. Gallagher, the administrator of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. The data upon which the story is based are, of course, from the ongoing work of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR; see http://www.tighar.org/). Profits from publication (if and when they develop) will be shared with TIGHAR and with the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), the Kiribati government program that seeks to protect the island group of which Nikumaroro is a part.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
"Procedural Requirements"
Haleakala Advanced Technology Solar Telescope Special Use Permit- The Committee included report language supporting the potential development of an Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) within the Haleakala High Altitude Observatories. The Service is expected to work cooperatively with the National Science Foundation to effectuate the issuance of a Special Use Permit for access to the ATST construction site as soon as possible. In turn, The Foundation is expected to complete its analysis on the effects to Service standards in a timely fashion so that the Service can fully comply with all procedural requirements and complete the permitting process within 150 days of enactment of the Act.
That’s from a summary of the National Park Service’s 2009 appropriations legislation. Note the direction to NPS to comply expeditiously with the “procedural requirements” that stand in the way of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in constructing the solar telescope on Haleakala. This dismissive characterization by the U.S. Congress, which of course created the requirements, typifies what’s wrong with the public’s understanding of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).
Both authorities apply in this case. NSF wants to support construction of the telescope on a mountain that Native Hawaiians regard as a sensitive spiritual place. If history is any guide – NSF having dirtied its pants in at least three previous cases of this kind, – NSF is trying to complete an “analysis” documenting that its project will have no adverse effects on historic properties under NHPA, and no significant impact on the human environment under NEPA. NPS controls Haleakala, and – being considerate of Native Hawaiian concerns – has very likely not been enthusiastic about NSF’s analysis. So Congress directs NPS to “work cooperatively” with NSF and get those pesky “procedural requirements” out of the way so it can “complete the permitting process” within 150 days.
In other words: “You kids get together and jump through the silly little procedural hoops that our predecessors in these chambers set up, and get that telescope built.” The notion that laws like NEPA and NHPA might have some actual purpose – that NSF and NPS in this case ought actually to examine honestly what the impacts of the project will be on the valued human environment, and consider less impactful ways of achieving its purposes – seems quite lost on the lawmakers.
But it’s hard to blame Congress, because we practitioners of NEPA and Section 106, and the agencies that oversee their implementation, have been largely responsible for creating the impression that the impact assessment laws are merely procedural. We have routinely assured our clients, those we regulate, the courts, and Congress itself that NEPA and Section 106 do not dictate the outcome of review, but merely specify the processes by which decisions are to be made.
This procedural proposition is correct, of course, as far as it goes. It must be so; we can’t have a legal system that prohibits ever having an impact on the human environment, or on historic places. But that doesn’t mean that the procedures carried out under NEPA and Section 106 are supposed to have no effect. They're supposed to lead to informed decision making -- sometimes to go ahead as planned, sometimes to pursue an alternative way of achieving a project's purpose, sometimes to abandon that purpose because its environmental costs are too great. It is oxymoronic to direct agencies to carry out the “procedural requirements” with the expectation that their results will be ignored.
Honest, objective review of the Haleakala solar telescope project might reveal that building it will do very serious damage to the environment as Native Hawaiians perceive it, and that there are other, better ways to achieve the project’s purposes. Or it might reveal quite the opposite, or something entirely different. Assuming there will be serious impacts, NSF and NPS might or might not decide that the value of the project overrides the importance of its impacts, and go ahead with it. Or they might select some alternative that does less damage. What they cannot do, and be in compliance with the law, is to pretend that real impacts do not exist. The “procedural” requirements of NEPA and NHPA should have a practical outcome; there is a point to their existence, a reason for complying with them. If they’re not going to be treated as having a purpose, there is obviously no reason to retain them in law.
If Congress doesn’t want NSF to concern itself with the project’s impacts on the Native Hawaiian spiritual environment, it ought to be honest and say so – just waive the requirements of NEPA and Section 106. Telling NSF and NPS to perform the reviews but get on with the project regardless of their results makes no sense. It does, however, reflect the sorry state to which public understanding of – and our own practice under – NEPA and NHPA have sunk.
That’s from a summary of the National Park Service’s 2009 appropriations legislation. Note the direction to NPS to comply expeditiously with the “procedural requirements” that stand in the way of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in constructing the solar telescope on Haleakala. This dismissive characterization by the U.S. Congress, which of course created the requirements, typifies what’s wrong with the public’s understanding of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).
Both authorities apply in this case. NSF wants to support construction of the telescope on a mountain that Native Hawaiians regard as a sensitive spiritual place. If history is any guide – NSF having dirtied its pants in at least three previous cases of this kind, – NSF is trying to complete an “analysis” documenting that its project will have no adverse effects on historic properties under NHPA, and no significant impact on the human environment under NEPA. NPS controls Haleakala, and – being considerate of Native Hawaiian concerns – has very likely not been enthusiastic about NSF’s analysis. So Congress directs NPS to “work cooperatively” with NSF and get those pesky “procedural requirements” out of the way so it can “complete the permitting process” within 150 days.
In other words: “You kids get together and jump through the silly little procedural hoops that our predecessors in these chambers set up, and get that telescope built.” The notion that laws like NEPA and NHPA might have some actual purpose – that NSF and NPS in this case ought actually to examine honestly what the impacts of the project will be on the valued human environment, and consider less impactful ways of achieving its purposes – seems quite lost on the lawmakers.
But it’s hard to blame Congress, because we practitioners of NEPA and Section 106, and the agencies that oversee their implementation, have been largely responsible for creating the impression that the impact assessment laws are merely procedural. We have routinely assured our clients, those we regulate, the courts, and Congress itself that NEPA and Section 106 do not dictate the outcome of review, but merely specify the processes by which decisions are to be made.
This procedural proposition is correct, of course, as far as it goes. It must be so; we can’t have a legal system that prohibits ever having an impact on the human environment, or on historic places. But that doesn’t mean that the procedures carried out under NEPA and Section 106 are supposed to have no effect. They're supposed to lead to informed decision making -- sometimes to go ahead as planned, sometimes to pursue an alternative way of achieving a project's purpose, sometimes to abandon that purpose because its environmental costs are too great. It is oxymoronic to direct agencies to carry out the “procedural requirements” with the expectation that their results will be ignored.
Honest, objective review of the Haleakala solar telescope project might reveal that building it will do very serious damage to the environment as Native Hawaiians perceive it, and that there are other, better ways to achieve the project’s purposes. Or it might reveal quite the opposite, or something entirely different. Assuming there will be serious impacts, NSF and NPS might or might not decide that the value of the project overrides the importance of its impacts, and go ahead with it. Or they might select some alternative that does less damage. What they cannot do, and be in compliance with the law, is to pretend that real impacts do not exist. The “procedural” requirements of NEPA and NHPA should have a practical outcome; there is a point to their existence, a reason for complying with them. If they’re not going to be treated as having a purpose, there is obviously no reason to retain them in law.
If Congress doesn’t want NSF to concern itself with the project’s impacts on the Native Hawaiian spiritual environment, it ought to be honest and say so – just waive the requirements of NEPA and Section 106. Telling NSF and NPS to perform the reviews but get on with the project regardless of their results makes no sense. It does, however, reflect the sorry state to which public understanding of – and our own practice under – NEPA and NHPA have sunk.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Expeditious NEPA Compliance by the Shortest Applicable Process
Expeditious NEPA Compliance by the Shortest Applicable Process: How to Do It?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requires that adequate resources be devoted to ensuring that applicable environmental reviews are completed on projects funded under the act, that such reviews be completed “on an expeditious basis,” and that “the shortest applicable process allowed under the National Environmental Policy Act be utilized." What does this mean for a local government, federal agency, or private firm involved in ARRA work?
NEPA and Its Kin
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), enacted in 1969, establishes general policy favoring taking care of the environment, and specifically requires that federal agencies consider the effects of work they propose to fund on “the quality of the human environment.” A number of other laws have similar requirements – notably the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). All these laws apply to ARRA-funded projects.
The Purpose of Review
The (often forgotten) purpose of review under NEPA and its kin is to see what the environmental impacts will be if the project being reviewed is carried out, and if such impacts are severe, to seek reasonable ways to avoid or reduce them.
Adequate Resources
“Adequate resources” to complete reviews under NEPA generally means enough money and time to carry out studies of potential effects, to consult with the interested public and with experts as needed to define the effects and explore ways to reduce or avoid them, and to implement whatever impact avoidance or reduction schemes are developed. What this means in any particular case, of course, depends on local circumstances.
Shortest Applicable Process
Each federal agency has its own procedures for doing NEPA review, but under the general regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) there are three ways to complete review. Which one is appropriate depends on how severe the impacts of the proposed project are likely to be.
Categorical exclusion screening. Many project types are “categorically excluded” from review under NEPA – meaning that in theory, their likely impacts are so minor that there is no need to review them at all. However, because theory is not always reflected by reality, the regulations require that projects thought to fit into excluded categories be screened somehow to determine whether “extraordinary circumstances” exist that require a higher level of review. Exactly how this screening is done – and what happens if extraordinary circumstances are discovered – depends on the NEPA procedures of the relevant federal agency.
Environmental assessment. Where a project is not categorically excluded, but the severity of its impacts isn’t known, the responsible federal agency is required to perform an “environmental assessment” (EA). The EA is supposed to be a “brief but thorough” analysis to determine whether the project’s impacts are likely to be significant. If they aren’t, the agency can issue a “finding of no significant impact” (FONSI) and proceed. If there are likely to be significant impacts, the agency must prepare an environmental impact statement.
Environmental Impact Statement. An environmental impact statement (EIS) is a detailed analysis of a project’s impacts, and of alternatives to avoid or reduce the impacts. NEPA doesn’t prohibit having significant impacts on the environment, but it does require a hard examination of what they are, and real efforts to find ways to avoid or reduce them. The EIS is considered by the agency in deciding whether and how to proceed with the project; once a decision is made, the agency issues a “record of decision” (ROD) and proceeds. The ROD often lays out what is to be done to avoid or reduce impacts.
Complying with NEPA (and its kin) on an ARRA Project
Generally speaking, the shortest NEPA process is screening a categorically excluded project, so – again generally speaking – it’s best to allocate ARRA funds to projects that fall into categories excluded from NEPA review under the relevant agency’s NEPA procedures. However, there are pitfalls in this approach, because depending on the project, there may be “extraordinary circumstances” that cause considerable delay.
The EA and FONSI generally comprise the next shortest NEPA process, but here again if there are significant impacts, they can lead to significant delays. The EIS-ROD is usually the most complicated, longest form of NEPA review.
The worst delays of all result from trying to sweep impacts under the rug, or from conducting a “quickie” analysis that doesn’t look fully and comprehensively at the project’s potential impacts and seek ways to resolve them – unless, of course, you’re successful in doing so.
As a general rule, it is wisest to assume that impacts will occur, and allocate the resources necessary to identify and resolve them, as an orderly part of your project. Remember, NEPA and most of its kin don't prohibit having environmental impacts; they simply require that they be acknowledged, revealed to and discussed with the public, and resolved somehow if there's a way to do so.
Don’t Forget Those Kin
In carrying out review under NEPA, don’t forget all the related laws – ESA, Section 106 of NHPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, a host of others. Review under these laws is just as mandatory as is review under NEPA, and one does not substitute for another. In other words, the fact that you’ve complied with NEPA doesn’t mean you’ve complied with NHPA or ESA or any of the others – unless you have, following the regulations relevant to each of them.
What If Your Project is “Shovel-Ready?”
There’s been a lot of talk in the run-up to ARRA about funding only projects that are “shovel-ready.” Presumably this means projects on which, among other things, NEPA review has been completed. If review under NEPA and its kin has already been completed on your project, that’s definitely a good thing, but be careful. It’s not always easy to know whether review really has been completed. Sometimes NEPA has apparently been complied with but Section 106 of NHPA or some other review requirement has not. Sometimes the law was “complied with” years ago, and since then laws or circumstances have changed, creating the need for further review. For example, no one was giving much consideration ten years ago to a project’s potential impacts on climate change, but now it’s a big issue. Similarly , it’s only been in the last decade or so that NEPA analysts have begun systematically to examine “environmental justice” issues – will this project have disproportionate adverse impacts on the environments of low income or minority people? “Cumulative effects” – how this project’s effects will contribute to the general pattern of change in a resource or an area – is another issue that has begun to get much more attention in recent years than in the past; it’s been the basis for a good deal of project-stopping litigation. So a project that was “shovel-ready” a decade ago may not be so ready today; older impact analyses may need some tuning-up.
Who Can Help (or Hurt) You?
There are innumerable consulting firms eager to help you complete NEPA review on your projects, but be careful. The environmental impact assessment (EIA) industry is not very well regulated or overseen by government or anyone else. As a result, there are a lot of not-particularly competent, and not-especially ethical, companies out there. Different companies can also mean different things when they say they do “environmental” assessments. Some companies are essentially engineering firms that focus on solving problems of air and water pollution; others pay close attention to impacts on natural resources but don’t deal very well with, say, impacts on the urban environment or historic buildings, while others know how to deal with the built environment but aren’t very good with plants and animals. You need to do some research to find the right kind of help. Checking with state and local regulators is a good way to start, but there is no simple, universally applicable way to make sure you get the right kind of assistance. A lot depends simply on thinking about what you propose to do and what it’s going to do to the world. Will it dig up a lot of ground? Knock down or modify a building or neighborhood? Remove a lot of trees? Pump stuff into the air or water? Displace people? Then design a scope of work that focuses on assessing the impacts of such changes, and look for firms that can demonstrate the ability to assess them.
The Prime Directive: Don’t Wait!
The one certain thing about review under NEPA and its kin is that the sooner you get started on it, the faster and more reliably you’re likely to get it done. Conversely, if you wait – if you treat the reviews as something you can check off your list late in the planning process, you’re likely to get into trouble that will delay or even kill your project. So if you’re considering an ARRA-funded project, and you’re not sure that NEPA and the other environmental review laws have already been complied with, then get to work NOW figuring out what kinds of reviews are necessary and getting them underway.
Addendum: Per Active's suggestion below, here's a link to the energy and environment forum, where ARRA and its environmental implications will be further discussed: www.energyenvironmentforum.com
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requires that adequate resources be devoted to ensuring that applicable environmental reviews are completed on projects funded under the act, that such reviews be completed “on an expeditious basis,” and that “the shortest applicable process allowed under the National Environmental Policy Act be utilized." What does this mean for a local government, federal agency, or private firm involved in ARRA work?
NEPA and Its Kin
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), enacted in 1969, establishes general policy favoring taking care of the environment, and specifically requires that federal agencies consider the effects of work they propose to fund on “the quality of the human environment.” A number of other laws have similar requirements – notably the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). All these laws apply to ARRA-funded projects.
The Purpose of Review
The (often forgotten) purpose of review under NEPA and its kin is to see what the environmental impacts will be if the project being reviewed is carried out, and if such impacts are severe, to seek reasonable ways to avoid or reduce them.
Adequate Resources
“Adequate resources” to complete reviews under NEPA generally means enough money and time to carry out studies of potential effects, to consult with the interested public and with experts as needed to define the effects and explore ways to reduce or avoid them, and to implement whatever impact avoidance or reduction schemes are developed. What this means in any particular case, of course, depends on local circumstances.
Shortest Applicable Process
Each federal agency has its own procedures for doing NEPA review, but under the general regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) there are three ways to complete review. Which one is appropriate depends on how severe the impacts of the proposed project are likely to be.
Categorical exclusion screening. Many project types are “categorically excluded” from review under NEPA – meaning that in theory, their likely impacts are so minor that there is no need to review them at all. However, because theory is not always reflected by reality, the regulations require that projects thought to fit into excluded categories be screened somehow to determine whether “extraordinary circumstances” exist that require a higher level of review. Exactly how this screening is done – and what happens if extraordinary circumstances are discovered – depends on the NEPA procedures of the relevant federal agency.
Environmental assessment. Where a project is not categorically excluded, but the severity of its impacts isn’t known, the responsible federal agency is required to perform an “environmental assessment” (EA). The EA is supposed to be a “brief but thorough” analysis to determine whether the project’s impacts are likely to be significant. If they aren’t, the agency can issue a “finding of no significant impact” (FONSI) and proceed. If there are likely to be significant impacts, the agency must prepare an environmental impact statement.
Environmental Impact Statement. An environmental impact statement (EIS) is a detailed analysis of a project’s impacts, and of alternatives to avoid or reduce the impacts. NEPA doesn’t prohibit having significant impacts on the environment, but it does require a hard examination of what they are, and real efforts to find ways to avoid or reduce them. The EIS is considered by the agency in deciding whether and how to proceed with the project; once a decision is made, the agency issues a “record of decision” (ROD) and proceeds. The ROD often lays out what is to be done to avoid or reduce impacts.
Complying with NEPA (and its kin) on an ARRA Project
Generally speaking, the shortest NEPA process is screening a categorically excluded project, so – again generally speaking – it’s best to allocate ARRA funds to projects that fall into categories excluded from NEPA review under the relevant agency’s NEPA procedures. However, there are pitfalls in this approach, because depending on the project, there may be “extraordinary circumstances” that cause considerable delay.
The EA and FONSI generally comprise the next shortest NEPA process, but here again if there are significant impacts, they can lead to significant delays. The EIS-ROD is usually the most complicated, longest form of NEPA review.
The worst delays of all result from trying to sweep impacts under the rug, or from conducting a “quickie” analysis that doesn’t look fully and comprehensively at the project’s potential impacts and seek ways to resolve them – unless, of course, you’re successful in doing so.
As a general rule, it is wisest to assume that impacts will occur, and allocate the resources necessary to identify and resolve them, as an orderly part of your project. Remember, NEPA and most of its kin don't prohibit having environmental impacts; they simply require that they be acknowledged, revealed to and discussed with the public, and resolved somehow if there's a way to do so.
Don’t Forget Those Kin
In carrying out review under NEPA, don’t forget all the related laws – ESA, Section 106 of NHPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, a host of others. Review under these laws is just as mandatory as is review under NEPA, and one does not substitute for another. In other words, the fact that you’ve complied with NEPA doesn’t mean you’ve complied with NHPA or ESA or any of the others – unless you have, following the regulations relevant to each of them.
What If Your Project is “Shovel-Ready?”
There’s been a lot of talk in the run-up to ARRA about funding only projects that are “shovel-ready.” Presumably this means projects on which, among other things, NEPA review has been completed. If review under NEPA and its kin has already been completed on your project, that’s definitely a good thing, but be careful. It’s not always easy to know whether review really has been completed. Sometimes NEPA has apparently been complied with but Section 106 of NHPA or some other review requirement has not. Sometimes the law was “complied with” years ago, and since then laws or circumstances have changed, creating the need for further review. For example, no one was giving much consideration ten years ago to a project’s potential impacts on climate change, but now it’s a big issue. Similarly , it’s only been in the last decade or so that NEPA analysts have begun systematically to examine “environmental justice” issues – will this project have disproportionate adverse impacts on the environments of low income or minority people? “Cumulative effects” – how this project’s effects will contribute to the general pattern of change in a resource or an area – is another issue that has begun to get much more attention in recent years than in the past; it’s been the basis for a good deal of project-stopping litigation. So a project that was “shovel-ready” a decade ago may not be so ready today; older impact analyses may need some tuning-up.
Who Can Help (or Hurt) You?
There are innumerable consulting firms eager to help you complete NEPA review on your projects, but be careful. The environmental impact assessment (EIA) industry is not very well regulated or overseen by government or anyone else. As a result, there are a lot of not-particularly competent, and not-especially ethical, companies out there. Different companies can also mean different things when they say they do “environmental” assessments. Some companies are essentially engineering firms that focus on solving problems of air and water pollution; others pay close attention to impacts on natural resources but don’t deal very well with, say, impacts on the urban environment or historic buildings, while others know how to deal with the built environment but aren’t very good with plants and animals. You need to do some research to find the right kind of help. Checking with state and local regulators is a good way to start, but there is no simple, universally applicable way to make sure you get the right kind of assistance. A lot depends simply on thinking about what you propose to do and what it’s going to do to the world. Will it dig up a lot of ground? Knock down or modify a building or neighborhood? Remove a lot of trees? Pump stuff into the air or water? Displace people? Then design a scope of work that focuses on assessing the impacts of such changes, and look for firms that can demonstrate the ability to assess them.
The Prime Directive: Don’t Wait!
The one certain thing about review under NEPA and its kin is that the sooner you get started on it, the faster and more reliably you’re likely to get it done. Conversely, if you wait – if you treat the reviews as something you can check off your list late in the planning process, you’re likely to get into trouble that will delay or even kill your project. So if you’re considering an ARRA-funded project, and you’re not sure that NEPA and the other environmental review laws have already been complied with, then get to work NOW figuring out what kinds of reviews are necessary and getting them underway.
Addendum: Per Active's suggestion below, here's a link to the energy and environment forum, where ARRA and its environmental implications will be further discussed: www.energyenvironmentforum.com
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Our Unprotected Heritage in a Bookstore Near You
Left Coast Press (www.lcoastpress.com) has just published my latest book – Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment. Probably destined to make me thoroughly unemployable in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) and cultural resource management (CRM) industries, it’s an exposé on how those industries have become corrupted since their inceptions back in the 1970s. A familiar topic to readers of this blog, I realize, but Unprotected makes, I hope, a rather more fully developed case, and concludes with concrete recommendations to President Obama. Who hasn’t said whether he’ll review it, but who knows?
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Gimme Gimme Gimme: the ACHP's January 16 Recommendations
I’m grateful to Al Tonetti of the ASC Group in Columbus, Ohio for alerting me to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s (ACHP) new report (issued January 16, 2009, entitled “Recommendations to Improve the Structure of the Federal Historic Preservation Program” and accessible at http://www.achp.gov/news090201.html. Although the ACHP issued a press release on the report, it has not made much of it – possibly because it has the good sense to be embarrassed by it.
The report is not worth spending much time to review, but let’s just run through its recommendations. Most are the kind of thing you expect from any federal agency given (by itself in this case) the opportunity to call for an improvement in its own status and that of its political allies. Coming out at the time it did, though – four days before the inauguration of a president whose election repudiated the then-incumbant who appointed the ACHP’s members, in the midst of the worst international economic disaster in memory, the report is remarkable for its naïve self-promotion.
Recommendation 1: Build up the power of the ACHP. The ACHP recommends that it be headed by a chairperson appointed by the President (as is now the case) with the advice and consent of the Senate (as is not now the case). It also recommends that the chairperson be made a full-time federal employee and that he or she serve on the Domestic Policy Council (DPC). In other words, the ACHP should be recognized as having an influence on national domestic policy equivalent to that exercised by such regular DPC members as the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Transportation, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors.
It is not clear why – after frittering away the last eight years patting itself on the back for giving “preserve America” grants to worthy, noncontroversial projects – the ACHP thinks it has anything useful to say about federal domestic policy. To the extent it provides a rationale for its recommendation, the ACHP stresses the importance of the Section 106 review process – precisely the aspect of its authority and responsibility that it has most thoroughly neglected in recent years.
Recommendation 2: Create an Office of Preservation Policy and Procedure (OPPP) in the Office of the Secretary of the Interior. The OPPP would “provide leadership and direction” to Interior agencies in carrying out their responsibilities under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). There are some implications in the report that the OPPP would take over the interagency functions of the National Park Service (NPS) – maintaining the National Register of Historic Places, overseeing project certification for tax benefits, and so on. There would be some benefit in such a reorganization; the “external” programs have never been a happy fit within NPS. But the report doesn’t really go beyond implying such a change. Given NPS's predictable response to any assault on its turf, it is most likely that the OPPP would become simply another level of bureaucracy within the Interior Department.
Recommendation 3: Create an Associate Director for Cultural Resources within the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The rationale for this proposal is to improve the “profile” of historic preservation within the Executive Office of the President. This is doubtless a worthy goal from the standpoint of historic preservation, but it is hardly sufficient. Kite-flyers, all-terrain vehicle drivers, and gardeners would probably like to have their profiles enhanced, too, but this is hardly justification for the assignment of high-level CEQ officials to represent their interests. The ACHP does point out that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is designed to promote the protection of historic and cultural as well as natural resources, but it makes little or no case for the proposition either that CEQ currently gives such resources short shrift or that adding another official to that body would improve matters.
Recommendation 4: Beef up the Federal Preservation Officers. The ACHP points back to Executive Order 13287, the Bush administration's one legitimate effort to promote federal agency responsibility toward historic preservation, and says its provisions should be implemented. The vehicle it proposes for getting this done is for the ACHP's chairperson and the Office of Management and Budget to make it happen. Since the executive order, the chairperson, and OMB have been around for some years, one wonders why this recommendation has to be made; why has it not already been realized?
Recommendation 5: More money. It wouldn’t be a federal agency recommendation if it didn’t seek more money for agency programs, or for those of its allies. The ACHP report predictably recommends increased funding for the State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs) and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs). Without getting into whether such increases might be justified (I wouldn’t assume them so without a hard review of how the THPOs and especially the SHPOs are spending the money they already have, under NPS’s generally misguided rules), it is hard to imagine that such increases are very likely under current economic circumstances.
Recommendation 6: More money and technical support to THPOs. The THPOs get a second bite of the ACHP’s proposed funding apple, though it’s not clear how the fiscal part of this recommendation differs from the THPO part of the preceding one. The THPOs certainly do need more money, but they also need relief from pointless NPS regulation and mindless federal agency pretenses at “tribal consultation.” What they probably do not need is “technical support,” if this means – as it usually does – support in meeting NPS administrative and technical requirements.
Recommendation 7: Strengthen Section 106. This one – while not unjustified as far as it goes – is truly mind-boggling, particularly in the way it is phrased: “The Section 106 Function is Lagging, and Must be Strengthened.” Indeed, and why is it lagging? Does the lag have anything to do with the fact that the ACHP’s political and executive leadership has done everything in their power over the last two decades to minimize attention to Section 106? Does it reflect in any way the total lack of creative thought that the ACHP has given to Section 106 review in recent years? Does it have anything to do with the antagonism the ACHP leadership has shown those members of its staff who actually try to participate in review or encourage improved practice on the part of federal agencies and others? Not in the ACHP’s eyes, of course, so what should be done to “strengthen” Section 106? Provide “additional resources to support the ACHP’s crucial role.” Give us more money.
The ACHP goes on to propose that it ought to issue more guidance – which perhaps is true (though one cannot be sanguine about what it might issue), but if it is, why doesn’t the ACHP simply issue some? In a way it does, via this report, proposing better coordination between Section 106 and NEPA and offering some useful if hardly revolutionary suggestions: get 106 review underway before issuing environmental assessments or draft environmental impact statements, finish it before such documents are finalized, and don’t confuse the vacuous “public participation” typically provided for under NEPA with the consultation required under Section 106. It’s too bad the ACHP hasn’t done something over the last ten years to arrest the deterioration of the very consultation it now (by vague implication) extols.
This is a sad, predictable, silly report, which will doubtless get precisely the attention it deserves. I wonder how much of our tax money was spent producing it.
The report is not worth spending much time to review, but let’s just run through its recommendations. Most are the kind of thing you expect from any federal agency given (by itself in this case) the opportunity to call for an improvement in its own status and that of its political allies. Coming out at the time it did, though – four days before the inauguration of a president whose election repudiated the then-incumbant who appointed the ACHP’s members, in the midst of the worst international economic disaster in memory, the report is remarkable for its naïve self-promotion.
Recommendation 1: Build up the power of the ACHP. The ACHP recommends that it be headed by a chairperson appointed by the President (as is now the case) with the advice and consent of the Senate (as is not now the case). It also recommends that the chairperson be made a full-time federal employee and that he or she serve on the Domestic Policy Council (DPC). In other words, the ACHP should be recognized as having an influence on national domestic policy equivalent to that exercised by such regular DPC members as the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Transportation, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors.
It is not clear why – after frittering away the last eight years patting itself on the back for giving “preserve America” grants to worthy, noncontroversial projects – the ACHP thinks it has anything useful to say about federal domestic policy. To the extent it provides a rationale for its recommendation, the ACHP stresses the importance of the Section 106 review process – precisely the aspect of its authority and responsibility that it has most thoroughly neglected in recent years.
Recommendation 2: Create an Office of Preservation Policy and Procedure (OPPP) in the Office of the Secretary of the Interior. The OPPP would “provide leadership and direction” to Interior agencies in carrying out their responsibilities under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). There are some implications in the report that the OPPP would take over the interagency functions of the National Park Service (NPS) – maintaining the National Register of Historic Places, overseeing project certification for tax benefits, and so on. There would be some benefit in such a reorganization; the “external” programs have never been a happy fit within NPS. But the report doesn’t really go beyond implying such a change. Given NPS's predictable response to any assault on its turf, it is most likely that the OPPP would become simply another level of bureaucracy within the Interior Department.
Recommendation 3: Create an Associate Director for Cultural Resources within the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The rationale for this proposal is to improve the “profile” of historic preservation within the Executive Office of the President. This is doubtless a worthy goal from the standpoint of historic preservation, but it is hardly sufficient. Kite-flyers, all-terrain vehicle drivers, and gardeners would probably like to have their profiles enhanced, too, but this is hardly justification for the assignment of high-level CEQ officials to represent their interests. The ACHP does point out that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is designed to promote the protection of historic and cultural as well as natural resources, but it makes little or no case for the proposition either that CEQ currently gives such resources short shrift or that adding another official to that body would improve matters.
Recommendation 4: Beef up the Federal Preservation Officers. The ACHP points back to Executive Order 13287, the Bush administration's one legitimate effort to promote federal agency responsibility toward historic preservation, and says its provisions should be implemented. The vehicle it proposes for getting this done is for the ACHP's chairperson and the Office of Management and Budget to make it happen. Since the executive order, the chairperson, and OMB have been around for some years, one wonders why this recommendation has to be made; why has it not already been realized?
Recommendation 5: More money. It wouldn’t be a federal agency recommendation if it didn’t seek more money for agency programs, or for those of its allies. The ACHP report predictably recommends increased funding for the State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs) and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs). Without getting into whether such increases might be justified (I wouldn’t assume them so without a hard review of how the THPOs and especially the SHPOs are spending the money they already have, under NPS’s generally misguided rules), it is hard to imagine that such increases are very likely under current economic circumstances.
Recommendation 6: More money and technical support to THPOs. The THPOs get a second bite of the ACHP’s proposed funding apple, though it’s not clear how the fiscal part of this recommendation differs from the THPO part of the preceding one. The THPOs certainly do need more money, but they also need relief from pointless NPS regulation and mindless federal agency pretenses at “tribal consultation.” What they probably do not need is “technical support,” if this means – as it usually does – support in meeting NPS administrative and technical requirements.
Recommendation 7: Strengthen Section 106. This one – while not unjustified as far as it goes – is truly mind-boggling, particularly in the way it is phrased: “The Section 106 Function is Lagging, and Must be Strengthened.” Indeed, and why is it lagging? Does the lag have anything to do with the fact that the ACHP’s political and executive leadership has done everything in their power over the last two decades to minimize attention to Section 106? Does it reflect in any way the total lack of creative thought that the ACHP has given to Section 106 review in recent years? Does it have anything to do with the antagonism the ACHP leadership has shown those members of its staff who actually try to participate in review or encourage improved practice on the part of federal agencies and others? Not in the ACHP’s eyes, of course, so what should be done to “strengthen” Section 106? Provide “additional resources to support the ACHP’s crucial role.” Give us more money.
The ACHP goes on to propose that it ought to issue more guidance – which perhaps is true (though one cannot be sanguine about what it might issue), but if it is, why doesn’t the ACHP simply issue some? In a way it does, via this report, proposing better coordination between Section 106 and NEPA and offering some useful if hardly revolutionary suggestions: get 106 review underway before issuing environmental assessments or draft environmental impact statements, finish it before such documents are finalized, and don’t confuse the vacuous “public participation” typically provided for under NEPA with the consultation required under Section 106. It’s too bad the ACHP hasn’t done something over the last ten years to arrest the deterioration of the very consultation it now (by vague implication) extols.
This is a sad, predictable, silly report, which will doubtless get precisely the attention it deserves. I wonder how much of our tax money was spent producing it.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Quantifying and Enforcing Irrelevance: The Proposed “Performance Measures for Historic Preservation.”
A report just issued by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) – Towards More Meaningful Performance Measures for Historic Preservation -- is worth examination by anyone concerned about the effectiveness, utility, and burdensomeness of the national historic preservation program.
Not that it’s a good report. It’s a dreadful report, and its preparation was a classic waste of taxpayer dollars on bureaucratic naval-gazing. But it’s worth looking at because it neatly encapsulates (and seeks to perpetuate) much of what’s made the national program as marginally relevant and maximally inefficient as it is. And because it places the program’s inanities in a larger public administration context, which helps account for them.
The idea of establishing and applying hard and fast quantitative performance measures has been popular in public administration for some time. Conceived in commercial and industrial contexts where they make a certain amount of sense –how many widgets you produce or sell are clearly relevant measures of a factory worker’s or salesperson’s performance --such measures began to be applied with a vengeance to the performance of federal employees during the time I was in government back in the 1980s. Of course, they didn’t work, because most federal agencies are designed to do things other than produce widgets. So they kept being reworked, rethought, but seldom if ever made more useful. We senior management types found ourselves required almost annually to reformulate the standards we applied in judging how our staffs were doing; it became something of a joke, but was taken with great seriousness by the Office of Management and Budget, and therefore by all the agencies. Soon the plague spread to the measurement of performance by government grant holders such as State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), and beyond government and business to many other sectors of society. Hence programs like “No Child Left Behind,” transforming our schools into factories for the production of test-takers.
There’s no question that government, like business (and school districts), needs to find ways of judging performance, both by programs and by employees. But the application of simplistic quantitative measures is often a waste of time, because what government does (like what a truly good school does) is not easily reduced to countable widgets. Moreover, a focus on quantitative measures can and does distract management from major non-quantitative issues that may confront and beset an agency. It is also a fact – most succinctly formulated in quantum physics, but very evident in public administration – that the act of measuring the performance of a variable affects the way that variable performs. This principle seems to be routinely ignored, or given very short shrift, by performance measure mavens; its doleful effects are very apparent in the way the national historic preservation program works (or fails to).
OK, let’s get specific. First, the NAPA report gives us nothing new; it largely regurgitates standards that have been used for decades by the National Park Service (NPS) in judging SHPOs, and by some land management agencies (and perhaps others) in purporting to measure their own performance. The report was not in fact prepared by NAPA; NAPA simply staffed a committee made up of the usual suspects – three NPS employees, two staffers from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), three SHPOs, the Federal Highway Administration’s federal preservation officer, one local government representative, three tribal representatives, and one person from what appears to be a consulting firm. Most of the names are very familiar; they’ve been around in their programs for decades. The tribal representatives seem to have focused, understandably and as usual, on making sure the tribes would be minimally affected by the standards; there are a couple of pages of caveats about how different the tribes are. So in essence, the standards were cooked up by NPS, the ACHP, one federal agency, one local government, and a consultant. No wonder they merely tweak existing measures.
So what are the measures? How should the performance of historic preservation programs be measured? Let’s look at those assigned “highest priority” by the report.
The first performance measure is “number of properties inventoried and evaluated as having actual or potential historic value.” This one has been imposed on SHPOs for a long time, and is one of the reasons SHPOs think they have to review every survey report, and insist on substantial documentation of every property, while their staffs rankle at having to perform a lot of meaningless paperwork. Of course, it also encourages hair-splitting; you don’t want to recognize the significance of an expansive historic landscape if counting all the individual “sites” in it will get you more performance points. The report leaves the reader to imagine how it is thought to reflect the quality of a program’s performance.
The next one is “number of properties given historic designation.” We are not told why designating something improves the thing designated or anything else; it is merely assumed that designation is a Good Thing. This measure – also long applied in one form or another to SHPOs – largely accounts for SHPO insistence that agencies and others nominate things to the National Register, regardless of whether doing so serves any practical purpose.
Next comes – get ready – “number of properties protected.” We are given no definition of “protected,” and again it is assumed without justification that “protection” is a good thing. And apparently protecting a place that nobody really gives a damn about is just as good as protecting one a community, a tribe, or a neighborhood truly treasures – as long as it meets the National Register’s criteria. Of course, none of the parties whose performance might be measured – SHPOs, agencies, tribes – has any realistic way of knowing how many properties are “protected” over a given time period, unless they find a way to impose incredibly burdensome reporting requirements. This probably won’t happen; they’ll make something up.
The next three reflect the predilections of the ACHP, though they’ve been around in SHPO standards for decades: “number of … finding(s) of no adverse effect,” “number of … finding(s) of adverse effect,” and “number of Section 106 programmatic agreements.” For some reason memoranda of agreement are apparently not to be counted. Nor are cases in which effects are avoided altogether, despite the fact that such cases presumably “protect” properties more effectively than any of the case-types that are to be counted. The overall effect of these measures is to promote a rigid, check-box approach to Section 106 review, and to canonize the notion that programmatic agreements are ipso facto good things.
The next one is “private capital leveraged by federal historic preservation tax credits,” which seems relatively sensible to me where such tax credits are involved – though it obviously imposes a record-keeping burden on whoever keeps the records (presumably SHPOs and NPS).
The last two high priority measures are “number of historic properties for which information is available on the internet” and “number of visitors to historic preservation websites.” The first measure, where it can be applied, would seem to favor entities with lots of historic properties and a predilection for recording them. The second seems almost sensible to me, but I should think it would present measurement problems – just what is an “historic preservation website?” The report “solves” this problem in a simplistic way by referring in detail only to SHPO, THPO, and NPS websites. This, of course, makes the measure wholly irrelevant to land management agencies, local governments, and others who maintain such sites.
There are other measures assigned lower priority by the report, but they’re pretty much of a piece with those just described.
It’s easy to see that these measures are pointless, that it was a waste of time to produce them. But they’re worse than useless because to the extent they’re actually applied, they require program participants to spend their time counting widgets rather than actually performing and improving program functions. And as noted, some of them encourage nit-picking, hair-splitting, over-documentation and inflexibility. They create systems in which participants spend their time – and insist that others spend their time – doing things that relate to the measures, as opposed to things that accomplish the purposes of the National Historic Preservation Act. Or any other public purpose.
“OK,” I hear the authors of the report fulminating – in the unlikely event they trouble themselves to read this – “so enough of your kvetching, King, where’s your alternative?” Indeed – given that there is a need to promote good performance in historic preservation programs, how can we “measure” it?
I put “measure” in quotes because I don’t think quantitative measures work – unless you truly are producing or disposing of widgets, which is not mostly what government does. But whether we can “measure” performance or not, I think we can judge performance.
Taking SHPOs as an example, suppose the NPS grant program procedures for SHPOs required each SHPO to have an annual public stakeholder conference in which all those who had had dealings with the SHPO over the preceding year got together with the SHPO (or in some contexts perhaps without him or her) and performed a critique. Make sure the public is aware of the conference and able to participate, so people who may have wanted to do something with the SHPO but been stiffed, or felt they’d been, could also take part. Maybe have a knowledgeable outside facilitator and a set of basic questions to explore, program areas to consider. How satisfied are you with the way the SHPO is representing your interests in historic properties, how sensitive the SHPO is to your economic or other needs, how creative the SHPO is in finding solutions to problems? How do you like the way the SHPO is handling Section 106 review, the National Register, tax act certifications, provision of public information, treatment of local governments, tribal concerns? Do a report, and if we must have quantification, assign a score or set of scores – on a scale of one to ten, this SHPO is an eight. File the report with NPS, which can consider it in deciding how much money each SHPO will get next year.
There are doubtless other ways to do it – probably lots of ways, and some may make more sense than what I’ve just suggested. We ought to consider them – or someone should. What we should not do is remain tied to something as thoroughly idiotic as rating the performance of inherently non-quantitative programs based on how many widgets they’ve produced.
Not that it’s a good report. It’s a dreadful report, and its preparation was a classic waste of taxpayer dollars on bureaucratic naval-gazing. But it’s worth looking at because it neatly encapsulates (and seeks to perpetuate) much of what’s made the national program as marginally relevant and maximally inefficient as it is. And because it places the program’s inanities in a larger public administration context, which helps account for them.
The idea of establishing and applying hard and fast quantitative performance measures has been popular in public administration for some time. Conceived in commercial and industrial contexts where they make a certain amount of sense –how many widgets you produce or sell are clearly relevant measures of a factory worker’s or salesperson’s performance --such measures began to be applied with a vengeance to the performance of federal employees during the time I was in government back in the 1980s. Of course, they didn’t work, because most federal agencies are designed to do things other than produce widgets. So they kept being reworked, rethought, but seldom if ever made more useful. We senior management types found ourselves required almost annually to reformulate the standards we applied in judging how our staffs were doing; it became something of a joke, but was taken with great seriousness by the Office of Management and Budget, and therefore by all the agencies. Soon the plague spread to the measurement of performance by government grant holders such as State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), and beyond government and business to many other sectors of society. Hence programs like “No Child Left Behind,” transforming our schools into factories for the production of test-takers.
There’s no question that government, like business (and school districts), needs to find ways of judging performance, both by programs and by employees. But the application of simplistic quantitative measures is often a waste of time, because what government does (like what a truly good school does) is not easily reduced to countable widgets. Moreover, a focus on quantitative measures can and does distract management from major non-quantitative issues that may confront and beset an agency. It is also a fact – most succinctly formulated in quantum physics, but very evident in public administration – that the act of measuring the performance of a variable affects the way that variable performs. This principle seems to be routinely ignored, or given very short shrift, by performance measure mavens; its doleful effects are very apparent in the way the national historic preservation program works (or fails to).
OK, let’s get specific. First, the NAPA report gives us nothing new; it largely regurgitates standards that have been used for decades by the National Park Service (NPS) in judging SHPOs, and by some land management agencies (and perhaps others) in purporting to measure their own performance. The report was not in fact prepared by NAPA; NAPA simply staffed a committee made up of the usual suspects – three NPS employees, two staffers from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), three SHPOs, the Federal Highway Administration’s federal preservation officer, one local government representative, three tribal representatives, and one person from what appears to be a consulting firm. Most of the names are very familiar; they’ve been around in their programs for decades. The tribal representatives seem to have focused, understandably and as usual, on making sure the tribes would be minimally affected by the standards; there are a couple of pages of caveats about how different the tribes are. So in essence, the standards were cooked up by NPS, the ACHP, one federal agency, one local government, and a consultant. No wonder they merely tweak existing measures.
So what are the measures? How should the performance of historic preservation programs be measured? Let’s look at those assigned “highest priority” by the report.
The first performance measure is “number of properties inventoried and evaluated as having actual or potential historic value.” This one has been imposed on SHPOs for a long time, and is one of the reasons SHPOs think they have to review every survey report, and insist on substantial documentation of every property, while their staffs rankle at having to perform a lot of meaningless paperwork. Of course, it also encourages hair-splitting; you don’t want to recognize the significance of an expansive historic landscape if counting all the individual “sites” in it will get you more performance points. The report leaves the reader to imagine how it is thought to reflect the quality of a program’s performance.
The next one is “number of properties given historic designation.” We are not told why designating something improves the thing designated or anything else; it is merely assumed that designation is a Good Thing. This measure – also long applied in one form or another to SHPOs – largely accounts for SHPO insistence that agencies and others nominate things to the National Register, regardless of whether doing so serves any practical purpose.
Next comes – get ready – “number of properties protected.” We are given no definition of “protected,” and again it is assumed without justification that “protection” is a good thing. And apparently protecting a place that nobody really gives a damn about is just as good as protecting one a community, a tribe, or a neighborhood truly treasures – as long as it meets the National Register’s criteria. Of course, none of the parties whose performance might be measured – SHPOs, agencies, tribes – has any realistic way of knowing how many properties are “protected” over a given time period, unless they find a way to impose incredibly burdensome reporting requirements. This probably won’t happen; they’ll make something up.
The next three reflect the predilections of the ACHP, though they’ve been around in SHPO standards for decades: “number of … finding(s) of no adverse effect,” “number of … finding(s) of adverse effect,” and “number of Section 106 programmatic agreements.” For some reason memoranda of agreement are apparently not to be counted. Nor are cases in which effects are avoided altogether, despite the fact that such cases presumably “protect” properties more effectively than any of the case-types that are to be counted. The overall effect of these measures is to promote a rigid, check-box approach to Section 106 review, and to canonize the notion that programmatic agreements are ipso facto good things.
The next one is “private capital leveraged by federal historic preservation tax credits,” which seems relatively sensible to me where such tax credits are involved – though it obviously imposes a record-keeping burden on whoever keeps the records (presumably SHPOs and NPS).
The last two high priority measures are “number of historic properties for which information is available on the internet” and “number of visitors to historic preservation websites.” The first measure, where it can be applied, would seem to favor entities with lots of historic properties and a predilection for recording them. The second seems almost sensible to me, but I should think it would present measurement problems – just what is an “historic preservation website?” The report “solves” this problem in a simplistic way by referring in detail only to SHPO, THPO, and NPS websites. This, of course, makes the measure wholly irrelevant to land management agencies, local governments, and others who maintain such sites.
There are other measures assigned lower priority by the report, but they’re pretty much of a piece with those just described.
It’s easy to see that these measures are pointless, that it was a waste of time to produce them. But they’re worse than useless because to the extent they’re actually applied, they require program participants to spend their time counting widgets rather than actually performing and improving program functions. And as noted, some of them encourage nit-picking, hair-splitting, over-documentation and inflexibility. They create systems in which participants spend their time – and insist that others spend their time – doing things that relate to the measures, as opposed to things that accomplish the purposes of the National Historic Preservation Act. Or any other public purpose.
“OK,” I hear the authors of the report fulminating – in the unlikely event they trouble themselves to read this – “so enough of your kvetching, King, where’s your alternative?” Indeed – given that there is a need to promote good performance in historic preservation programs, how can we “measure” it?
I put “measure” in quotes because I don’t think quantitative measures work – unless you truly are producing or disposing of widgets, which is not mostly what government does. But whether we can “measure” performance or not, I think we can judge performance.
Taking SHPOs as an example, suppose the NPS grant program procedures for SHPOs required each SHPO to have an annual public stakeholder conference in which all those who had had dealings with the SHPO over the preceding year got together with the SHPO (or in some contexts perhaps without him or her) and performed a critique. Make sure the public is aware of the conference and able to participate, so people who may have wanted to do something with the SHPO but been stiffed, or felt they’d been, could also take part. Maybe have a knowledgeable outside facilitator and a set of basic questions to explore, program areas to consider. How satisfied are you with the way the SHPO is representing your interests in historic properties, how sensitive the SHPO is to your economic or other needs, how creative the SHPO is in finding solutions to problems? How do you like the way the SHPO is handling Section 106 review, the National Register, tax act certifications, provision of public information, treatment of local governments, tribal concerns? Do a report, and if we must have quantification, assign a score or set of scores – on a scale of one to ten, this SHPO is an eight. File the report with NPS, which can consider it in deciding how much money each SHPO will get next year.
There are doubtless other ways to do it – probably lots of ways, and some may make more sense than what I’ve just suggested. We ought to consider them – or someone should. What we should not do is remain tied to something as thoroughly idiotic as rating the performance of inherently non-quantitative programs based on how many widgets they’ve produced.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Cutting a Bit of Fat from the Federal Budget: Do Away With the National Register of Historic Places
Maintaining the National Register of Historic Places – self-described as the nation’s official list of significant historic sites, districts, buildings, structures, and objects – is one of the minor non-park-related duties of the National Park Service. It doesn’t cost a great deal of money in terms of direct costs – just the salaries of some Park Service employees and associated administrative expenses – but that money could certainly be more fruitfully used for other things, and eliminating the Register would also result in significant indirect savings by simplifying and streamlining federal environmental impact review.
The Register serves three functions, none of them critical to government operations or the welfare of the American people:
1. Owners of income-producing properties included in the Register get federal income tax credits for rehabilitating such properties in such a way as to extend their lives and maintain their significant architectural qualities. If there were not a register of some kind it would be impossible to determine which properties should and should not receive such benefits. But “a register” does not have to be a central national register, maintained at considerable expense by the federal government. State and local lists would do just as well. Most states and many local governments already maintain their own lists of places they want to preserve; why not support them rather than maintaining a redundant national list?
2. The information in the Register can be and is used for educational and touristic purposes, but again, state and local lists, as well as Indian tribal and Native Hawaiian lists, could serve these purposes just as well as or better than the National Register. So could databases maintained by federal land managing agencies.
3. Federal agencies are required by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act to consider the effects of actions they plan – things they want to undertake or that others want to undertake with their assistance or permission – on places included in or eligible for the National Register. In my experience – and I’ve been working with Section 106 for over 40 years, inside and outside the federal government – tremendous amounts of time and money are wasted on argumentation over whether endangered places are eligible for inclusion in the Register. Not only is the time of highly paid specialists wasted in such arguments, but often important and expensive projects have to be delayed while they are conducted. The arguments almost never focus on serious questions about the cultural, historical, or architectural significance of such places; they almost always involve differing interpretations or understandings of the technical criteria for eligibility issued by the National Park Service. I believe we would have a much stronger, more efficient, more sensible procedure for managing federal impacts on historic places if we focused Section 106 review on whatever people concerned about a given proposed project thought was historically, culturally, or architecturally significant in the affected environment – always with the understanding that, as today, if agreement couldn’t be reached about how to deal with a project’s impacts, the responsible agency could get the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (or some equivalent body) and make its final decision about whether to go forward with the impacts or not. With such a system, of course, we would not need a National Register, and we would save the federal, state, local, and private money that goes into arguing over eligibilty for it.
We actually do not “need” a National Register today – it’s simply something that the National Historic Preservation Act created back in 1966 and we’ve gotten used to and stuck with. The Register today serves only as a distraction from the real work of preserving the heritage of the nation, its regions, states, tribes, and groups. It imposes upon us the obnoxious perception that the Secretary of the Interior, through the National Park Service, has to verify what is historically, culturally, and architecturally significant. Why is the Secretary qualified to do this, particularly with regard to what, say, the people of Gallup, New Mexico or Nyack, New York may think is part of their heritage? And why should the Secretary spend even a small chunk of his budget making decisions about such things? Why not let the people decide -- and save a bit of money, simplify government, and improve management of the environment in the process?
The Register serves three functions, none of them critical to government operations or the welfare of the American people:
1. Owners of income-producing properties included in the Register get federal income tax credits for rehabilitating such properties in such a way as to extend their lives and maintain their significant architectural qualities. If there were not a register of some kind it would be impossible to determine which properties should and should not receive such benefits. But “a register” does not have to be a central national register, maintained at considerable expense by the federal government. State and local lists would do just as well. Most states and many local governments already maintain their own lists of places they want to preserve; why not support them rather than maintaining a redundant national list?
2. The information in the Register can be and is used for educational and touristic purposes, but again, state and local lists, as well as Indian tribal and Native Hawaiian lists, could serve these purposes just as well as or better than the National Register. So could databases maintained by federal land managing agencies.
3. Federal agencies are required by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act to consider the effects of actions they plan – things they want to undertake or that others want to undertake with their assistance or permission – on places included in or eligible for the National Register. In my experience – and I’ve been working with Section 106 for over 40 years, inside and outside the federal government – tremendous amounts of time and money are wasted on argumentation over whether endangered places are eligible for inclusion in the Register. Not only is the time of highly paid specialists wasted in such arguments, but often important and expensive projects have to be delayed while they are conducted. The arguments almost never focus on serious questions about the cultural, historical, or architectural significance of such places; they almost always involve differing interpretations or understandings of the technical criteria for eligibility issued by the National Park Service. I believe we would have a much stronger, more efficient, more sensible procedure for managing federal impacts on historic places if we focused Section 106 review on whatever people concerned about a given proposed project thought was historically, culturally, or architecturally significant in the affected environment – always with the understanding that, as today, if agreement couldn’t be reached about how to deal with a project’s impacts, the responsible agency could get the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (or some equivalent body) and make its final decision about whether to go forward with the impacts or not. With such a system, of course, we would not need a National Register, and we would save the federal, state, local, and private money that goes into arguing over eligibilty for it.
We actually do not “need” a National Register today – it’s simply something that the National Historic Preservation Act created back in 1966 and we’ve gotten used to and stuck with. The Register today serves only as a distraction from the real work of preserving the heritage of the nation, its regions, states, tribes, and groups. It imposes upon us the obnoxious perception that the Secretary of the Interior, through the National Park Service, has to verify what is historically, culturally, and architecturally significant. Why is the Secretary qualified to do this, particularly with regard to what, say, the people of Gallup, New Mexico or Nyack, New York may think is part of their heritage? And why should the Secretary spend even a small chunk of his budget making decisions about such things? Why not let the people decide -- and save a bit of money, simplify government, and improve management of the environment in the process?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Impacts of the Stimulus Package
The Proposed Stimulus Package, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Cultural Resource Management
Thomas F. King: January 17, 2009
Introduction
As of January 15, 2009, we began to get a reasonably clear view of what the Obama Administration is proposing as a package of programs to stimulate the staggering economy. The package, as outlined in a paper entitled “Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment” issued on the 14th, includes quite a number of projects and programs that could have negative effects on the human environment, both natural and cultural. This is not to say that they are not good programs and projects – only that like most things we do, they may do injury to some aspect of the environment.
For several decades we have had laws requiring that the environmental impacts of federal proposals be reviewed in an orderly manner, so that they can be lessened if feasible, sometimes avoided altogether, or at least accepted with full knowledge of what we are doing. Notable among these laws are the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). Compliance with NEPA is a type of environmental impact assessment (EIA); EIA is conducted by governments and international bodies throughout the world in an effort to control environmental damage. Compliance with Section 106 of NHPA is an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as cultural resource management (CRM) – assessing and controlling impacts on the historic and other cultural aspects of the environment.
As discussed in my forthcoming book, Our Unprotected Heritage (Left Coast Press 2009), neither EIA nor CRM is performed very well in this country, but their performance is nevertheless a suggestion that project proponents and overseers have given some thought to the impacts of their actions. Such thought-giving takes a certain amount of time; it commonly requires some study, and it should (though seldom does) involve good-faith consultation with affected parties.
Whenever the federal government proposes a new program, a new infusion of money into society, there is the danger that the time will not be taken to give the impacts of the program the consideration that caution and discretion commend. This can have costly, damaging results. This danger is exacerbated when it is perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the money must be spent quickly.
As a long-term practitioner of EIA and CRM, I thought it might be useful, both to me and to interested colleagues, to go through the proposed stimulus package piece by piece and speculate about where problems are and are not likely to arise between implementing its terms and protection of the human environment. In doing so, below, I do not pretend to offer judgments about the appropriateness of the package’s components. I merely apply my knowledge of how the EIA/CRM systems have worked in the past, in an effort to be forewarned about where problems may arise in the near future as the stimulus package goes into effect.
Below, each “item” is derived verbatim (though with explanatory material and some lengthy descriptions of low potential impact programs deleted in many cases) from the summary paper alluded to above. Each “item” is followed by my assessment of the likelihood that it will present conflicts with protection of the natural and cultural environment, sometimes with brief elaboration on the kinds of conflicts I anticipate. What to do about these conflicts will be the subject of a subsequent paper, assuming I come up with any good ideas.
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Item: Reliable, Efficient Electricity Grid: $11 billion for research and development, pilot projects, and federal matching funds for the Smart Grid Investment Program
My assessment: There is a tendency to think that “green” projects are by definition “clean” projects that have no environmental impacts. Of course, this is by no means true, but such projects often get “fast-tracked” through EIA/CRM review, without full consideration of impacts, mitigation measures, and alternatives that would reduce impacts. One result of this is unnecessary damage to the environment; another can be costly last-minute delays when some serious impact is identified too late to be dealt with effectively and too dramatically to be ignored. To the extent the projects financed by this part of the program may disturb the land, buildings, viewscapes, or neighborhoods, or introduce visual, auditory, or other elements into the environment, and to the extent they haven’t been subjected to thorough, systematic, professionally responsible and transparent EIA/CRM review, they may produce a high level of conflict and damage.
Item: Renewable Energy Loan Guarantees: $8 billion for loans for renewable energy power generation and transmission projects.
My assessment: May be a particular problem because loan guarantees are subjected at best to rather sporadic EIA/CRM review. It is easy to imagine last-minute unanticipated conflicts.
Item: GSA Federal Buildings: $6.7 billion for renovations and repairs to federal buildings including at least $6 billion focused on increasing energy efficiency and conservation.
My assessment: The quality of GSA EIA/CRM historically is rather mixed, but GSA has a high level of expertise in building management and rehabilitation, so my guess is that these projects will mostly present few problems.
Item: Local Government Energy Efficiency Block Grants: $6.9 billion to help state and local governments make investments that make them more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions.
My assessment: Block grants historically have not been subjected to federal EIA and CRM review. Whether this is good policy is debatable, but it does eliminate the potential for much technical conflict with federal EIA and CRM laws.
Item: Energy Efficiency Housing Retrofits: $2.5 billion for a new program to upgrade HUD sponsored low-income housing to increase energy efficiency, including new insulation, windows, and furnaces. Funds will be competitively awarded.
My assessment: HUD has a relatively abysmal record of EIA/CRM review, and things like window replacement are historically problematic in terms of impacts on historic buildings. My guess is that most individual projects will be of sufficiently small scale as to be non-controversial, but at minimum I’d expect a fair amount of unnecessary damage to historic buildings and neighborhoods.
Item: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Research: $2 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities to foster energy independence, reduce carbon emissions, and cut utility bills. Funds are awarded on a competitive basis to universities, companies, and national laboratories.
My assessment: Much as with the housing retrofit projects, the problems with things like demonstration projects and “deployment activities” are likely to fly below the radar of public controversy over environmental impacts. Such impacts will probably occur, but be ignored unless a university, company or national lab that fails to get funds chooses to use the EIA/CRM laws to challenge a project that IS funded.
Item: Advanced Battery Loans and Grants: $2 billion for the Advanced Battery Loan Guarantee and Grants Program, to support U.S. manufacturers of advanced vehicle batteries and battery systems.
My assessment: EIA/CRM issues might arise around the manufacture of batteries, acquisition of raw materials, and disposal of wastes, but my guess is that these will be relatively rare and controllable.
Item: Home Weatherization: $6.2 billion to help low-income families reduce their energy costs by weatherizing their homes and make our country more energy efficient.
My assessment: Same potential problems as with HUD housing retrofits. A lot will depend on how the money is distributed, and by what agencies.
Item: Smart Appliances: $300 million to provide consumers with rebates for buying energy efficient Energy Star products to replace old appliances, which will lower energy bills.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: GSA Federal Fleet: $600 million to replace older vehicles owned by the federal government with alternative fuel automobiles that will save on fuel costs and reduce carbon emissions.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: Electric Transportation: $200 million for a new grant program to encourage electric vehicle technologies.
My assessment: To the extent this mostly stimulates research in existing labs and factories, probably not a problem.
Item: Cleaning Fossil Energy: $2.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration technology demonstration projects.
My assessment: To the extent this finances modifications to existing power plants and research in laboratories, probably not a problem except to the extent it fosters a continuing reliance on coal, and hence on mining with all its adverse environmental effects.
Item: Department of Defense Research: $350 million for research into using renewable energy to power weapons systems and military bases.
My assessment: The military services have relatively robust, if not always very efficient or transparent, EIA/CRM systems, and the funding proposed here won’t support much, so I would anticipate few problems.
Item: Alternative Buses and Trucks: $400 million to help state and local governments purchase efficient alternative fuel vehicles to reduce fuel costs and carbon emissions.
My assessment: Probably few problems.
Item: Industrial Energy Efficiency: $500 million for energy efficient manufacturing demonstration projects.
My assessment: To the extent this involves upgrading the efficiency of existing factories, probably few problems.
Item: Diesel Emissions Reduction: $300 million for grants and loans to state and local governments for projects that reduce diesel emissions.
My assessment: Probably few problems, but the description is too vague to allow much confidence.
Item: Wireless and Broadband Grants: $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas.
My assessment: Probably not a problem except to the extent it results in expansion of fiber-optic networks that require trenching and other potentially environmentally damaging activities. These are usually small-scale impacts, however, which should be fairly easily handled IF they are identified in a timely manner.
Item: National Science Foundation: $3 billion, including … $400 million to build major research facilities that perform cutting edge science, $300 million for major research equipment shared by institutions of higher education and other scientists, (and) $200 million to repair and modernize science and engineering research facilities.
My assessment: NSF, probably because it assumes that whatever it does is “good,” has a rotten track record in EIA/CRM. Wherever NSF funds new construction or renovation, there is the potential for unconsidered EIA/CRM conflicts. The rest of the $3 billion is to be allocated to relatively innocuous activities that should have few if any impacts.
Item: National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research: $2 billion, including $1.5 billion for …biomedical research… and $500 million to implement the repair and improvement strategic plan developed by the NIH for its campuses.
My assessment: No likely problems except with the $500 million campus upgrade – which also may not be a problem IF the strategic plan has been subjected to responsible EIA/CRM. This is by no means assured, however.
Item: University Research Facilities: $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.
My assessment: Universities are well known for their insensitivity to some EIA/CRM issues, notably historic preservation and respect for neighborhoods surrounding university campuses. To the extent this program funds improvements to existing facilities, the problems will probably be minimal, but new construction could trigger serious conflicts.
Item: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $462 million to enable CDC to complete its Buildings and Facilities Master Plan, as well as renovations and construction needs of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
My assessment: The potential for conflict depends on whether and how well the Master Plan and NIOSH construction plans have been subjected to responsible EIA/CRM review.
Item: Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences
My assessment: To the extent this supports research in existing labs, probably few problems.
Item: NASA: $600 million, including $400 (for) climate change research, $150 million for research, development, and demonstration to improve aviation safety and Next Generation air traffic control (NextGen); and $50 million to repair NASA centers damaged by hurricanes and floods last year.
My assessment: NASA is another “good” agency with a rotten record of EIA/CRM review, but to the extent this funding supports research with existing facilities and spacecraft, it should produce few problems.
Item: Biomedical Advanced Research and Development, Pandemic Flu, and Cyber Security: $900 million to prepare for a pandemic influenza.
My assessment: Probably no problems.
Item: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites and Sensors: $600 million for satellite development and acquisitions, including climate sensors and climate modeling.
My assessment: Probably no problems.
Item: National Institute of Standards and Technology: $300 million for competitive construction grants for research science buildings at colleges, universities, and other research organizations…
My assessment: The proposed grant recipients typically do a bad job of considering EIA/CRM issues, and NIST has little or no experience with EIA/CRM. As a result there may well be conflicts, though the program is small enough that it will probably result in a lot of relatively small grants with low potential for impacts.
Item: Agricultural Research Service: $209 million for agricultural research facilities across the country.
My assessment: This money will apparently be used mostly to correct problems arising from deferred maintenance on existing facilities, so probably won’t present many problems.
Item: U.S. Geological Survey: $200 million to repair and modernize U.S.G.S. science facilities and equipment.
My assessment: A pretty small program, probably little potential for problems.
Item: Small Business Credit: $430 million for new direct lending and loan guarantee authorities.
My assessment: Will probably finance some environmentally damaging activities, but SBA has mostly gotten away without much if any EIA/CRM review in the past, and will probably continue to do so.
Item: Rural Business-Cooperative Service: $100 million for rural business grants and loans to guarantee $2 billion in loans for rural businesses.
My assessment: “Rural businesses” like industrial agriculture can have a wide range of environmental impacts, which tend to be rather poorly managed, so the potential for uncontrolled environmental impact by this program is probably high, but the potential for controversy and conflict is probably low because such impacts tend to occur where no one is really watching.
Item: Industrial Technology Services: $100 million, including $70 million for the Technology Innovation Program to accelerate research in potentially revolutionary technologies … and $30 million for the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships to help small and mid-size manufacturers compete globally by providing them with access to technology.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Economic Development Assistance: $250 million to address long-term economic distress in urban industrial cores and rural areas. EDA leverages $10 in private investments for $1 in federal funds.
My assessment: A small program with big potential impacts on the environment because of its leveraging effects. To the extent projects it funds get EIA/CRM attention at all, they are likely to raise contentious issues concerning the extent to which the federal tail can wag the dog of a mostly non-federal development project.
Item: DTV Conversion Coupons: $650 million to continue the coupon program to enable American households to convert from analog television transmission to digital transmission.
My assessment: No problem except what’s going to happen to all those old TVs?
Item: Highway Infrastructure: $30 billion for highway and bridge construction projects.
My assessment: In an informal poll of state department of transportation (DOT) environmental staff, most reported that they had plenty of “shovel-ready” projects that had completed EIA/CRM review, but in some states (notably in the south) it appears that EIA/CRM review is not initiated until federal funds are in hand. A project in this condition shouldn’t be regarded as “shovel-ready,” but many probably will be, and could present serious conflicts if environmental and cultural resource issues arise at the “last minute.” There is also the question of the quality of the EIA/CRM work done on some ostensibly shovel-ready projects, particularly where such work was done either long ago or in the latter part of the Bush administration, during which EIA/CRM standards tended to be relaxed throughout the government.
Item: Transit New Construction: $1 billion for Capital Investment Grants for new commuter rail or other light rail systems to increase public use of mass transit and to speed projects already in construction.
My assessment: This will apparently be a Federal Transit Administration program; FTA’s handling of EIA/CRM matters tends to be pretty flaccid, so the potential for unresolved impacts and conflicts is probably pretty high.
Item: Transit Upgrades and Repair: $2 billion to modernize existing transit systems, including renovations to stations, security systems, computers, equipment, structures, signals, and communications. Funds will be distributed through the existing formula.
My assessment: Fairly high likelihood of impacts on historic rail facilities, stations, etc., which have probably not been thoroughly assessed.
Item: Transit Capital Assistance: $6 billion to purchase buses and equipment needed to increase public transportation and improve intermodal and transit facilities.
My assessment: Probably little danger of problems.
Item: Amtrak and Intercity Passenger Rail Construction Grants: $1.1 billion to improve the speed and capacity of intercity passenger rail service.
My assessment: May be some conflicts with historic facilities along Northeast Corridor, but such facilities are relatively well known, so there shouldn’t be a lot of unexpected problems.
Item: Transportation Security Administration Explosive Detection Systems: $500 million to install Aviation Explosive Detection Systems in the nation’s airports:
My assessment: Little danger of problems.
Item: Coast Guard Bridges: $150 million for ready-to-go investments to repair or remove bridges deemed hazardous to marine navigation.
My assessment: Depends on what the Coast Guard means by “ready-to-go.” If achieving this happy state includes completing responsible EIA/CRM work, there should be few problems, but this may be a big “if.”
Item: Social Security Administration Modernization: $400 million to replace the 30 year old Social Security Administration’s National Computer Center.
My assessment: Depends on whether this involves new construction or just upgrading equipment. New construction could present problems, but assuming that GSA will do the modernizing, there’s a reasonable chance that EIA/CRM issues are under control.
Item: Farm Service Agency: $245 million for critical IT improvements to systems that have been unable to handle workload increases.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: State Department Technology: $276 million to upgrade and modernize information technology platform.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: Department of Agriculture: $44 million for repairs and security improvements at USDA’s headquarters.
My assessment: My impression is that this project has been on GSA’s books for years, so EIA/CRM issues are probably under control.
Item: DOD Medical Facilities: $3.75 billion for new construction of hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers, and $455 million in renovations.
My assessment: Lots of potential for environmental/cultural impacts, but there is a fairly good chance that DOD has completed a responsible program of EIA/CRM, albeit perhaps with little public involvement.
Item: Facilities Renovations: $2.1 billion to address needed repairs to military facilities.
My assessment: Same as above, and special potential for problems if any renovations are to be carried out overseas, where pertinent US EIA/CRM laws have limited applicability.
Item: Troop Housing: $1.2 billion for new construction and $154 million for renovations to improve housing for our troops.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Child Development Center: $360 million for new child development centers.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Guard and Reserve: $400 million for new construction to support Guard and Reserve units across the country with operations and training facilities and utilities infrastructure.
My assessment: Same as above, with complications arising from likely questions about the relationship between federal and state programs/responsibilities/authorities.
Item: Veterans Medical Facilities: $950 million for veterans’ medical facilities.
My assessment: VA is playing catch up on its EIA/CRM responsibilities, toward which it has not very vigorously applied itself in the past. I anticipate serious conflicts here. In the interests of full disclosure, the reader should know that I am under contract to assist VA with resolving some existing CRM problems.
Item: Veterans Cemeteries: $50 million to put people to work making monument and memorial repairs at cemeteries.
My assessment: Depends on whether we’re talking here about literally just fixing monuments and memorials, which should have pretty limited impacts, or whether VA will include more extensive renovation/expansion of cemeteries. The latter could create serious impacts and controversies.
Item: Border Ports of Entry: $1.15 billion to construct GSA and Customs and Border Patrol land ports.
My assessment: This has been a GSA priority for some years, and it’s likely that some kind of EIA/CRM review has been completed on each project. Whether it’s been done well is another matter.
Item: Job Corps Facilities: $300 million to upgrade job training facilities serving at-risk youth while improving energy efficiency.
My assessment: Depends substantially on what agency will do the upgrading, but in any event we’re probably looking at relatively minor changes to existing facilities, so the problems may be limited.
Item: Construction on Public Lands and Parks: $1.8 billion for the National Park Service, $325 million for the Bureau of Land Management, $300 million for the National Wildlife Refuges and National Fish Hatcheries, and $650 million for the Forest Service.
My assessment: A good deal of potential for poorly defined and controlled impacts on the environment, both natural and cultural. Though NPS, BLM, FWS and FS have fairly robust programs of EIA/CRM, all have deteriorated in recent years, and have suffered from ill-advised though understandable efforts to “streamline” review in ways that have tended to reduce comprehensiveness and transparency.
Item: National Treasures: $400 million, including $200 million to address the deterioration of the National Mall; $150 million to address the repair backlog at the Smithsonian; and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
My assessment: National Mall repairs have almost surely undergone extensive review by a variety of planning bodies, so probably present few problems. The Smithsonian insists that it is not a federal agency whenever it is urged to comply with federal EIA/CRM laws, so the likelihood of undefined and very much unresolved conflicts over Smithsonian repairs may be high (depending on the scale and character of the repairs). NEA may have sporadic impacts on the environment, which almost certainly have not been properly identified and addressed.
Item: Clean Water State Revolving Fund: $6 billion for loans to help communities upgrade wastewater treatment systems.
My assessment: Considerable potential for impacts through improvement/extension of wastewater facilities. No idea to what extent the projects likely to be funded have undergone EIA/CRM review.
Item: Drinking Water State Revolving Fund: $2 billion for loans for drinking water infrastructure.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Rural Water and Waste Disposal: $1.5 billion to support $3.8 billion in grants and loans to help communities fund drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Corps of Engineers: $4.5 billion for environmental restoration, flood protection, hydropower, and navigation infrastructure critical to the economy.
My assessment: The Civil Works side of the Corps has a well-developed EIA/CRM program (as opposed to the Regulatory side, which is a poster child for mindless pseudo-compliance with EIA/CRM laws). I would not anticipate many problems with these projects.
Item: Bureau of Reclamation: $500 million to provide clean, reliable drinking water to rural areas and to ensure adequate water supply to western localities impacted by drought.
My assessment: Essentially the same as the various EPA water and wastewater programs.
Item: Watershed Infrastructure: $400 million for the Natural Resources Conservation Service watershed improvement programs to design and build flood protection and water quality projects, repair aging dams, and purchase and restore conservation easements in river flood zones.
My assessment: If these projects are parts of an NRCS backlog, they have probably undergone some level of EIA/CRM review, but my impression is that the quality of such review varies widely from area to area. My guess is that there will be few problems as the result of such a small infusion of money, however.
Item: International Boundary and Water Commission: $224 million to repair flood control systems along the international segment of the Rio Grande damaged by hurricane Katrina and other serious storms.
My assessment: Probably under control, particularly assuming FEMA involvement.
Item: Superfund Hazardous Waste Cleanup: $800 million to clean up hazardous and toxic waste sites that threaten health and the environment.
My assessment: Serious potential for destructive, costly, controversial conflicts. EPA (at least half the time) argues that it need not comply with EIA/CRM laws when it does Superfund cleanup, because the law (CERCLA) ostensibly exempts the agency from such laws. This is hardly true, but the law (CERCLA) is inartfully written, and EPA pretty regularly gets away without considering environmental impacts, or with considering them in very strange, usually highly inefficient, ineffective, and opaque ways. I seriously doubt if many projects to be funded out of this (admittedly small) pot have been responsibly subjected to EIA/CRM review. The organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has recently presented evidence of the damage EPA is doing to EPA’s Inspector General, requesting review. PEER’s arguments appear to me to be well founded.
Item: Leaking Underground Storage Tanks: $200 million for enforcement and cleanup of petroleum leaks from underground storage tanks at approximately 1,600 additional sites.
My assessment: Most of the projects that will be funded probably present few problems, but I question how well they have been examined for environmental and cultural resource impacts.
Item: Nuclear Waste Cleanup: $500 million for nuclear waste cleanup at sites contaminated as a result of the nation’s past nuclear activities.
My assessment: The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission routinely carry out what they interpret as EIA/CRM review, but it tends to be minimalist and hampered by over-lawyerly interpretations of their responsibilities. Such a small infusion of money will probably not make things notably worse than they are already, however.
Item: Closed Military Bases: $300 million for cleanup activities at closed military installations allowing local communities to redevelop these properties for productive use.
My assessment: Cleanup per se is probably not a serious issue, though the uses that may be allowed as a result may be another matter.
Item: NOAA Habitat Restoration: $400 million for ready-to-go habitat restoration projects.
My assessment: Depends on what “ready-to-go” means to NOAA.
Item: Brownfields: $100 million for competitive grants for evaluation and cleanup of former industrial and commercial sites.
My assessment: Some such sites are historically and archaeologically important, and some doubtless have other environmental values. EPA tends to be reluctant to acknowledge that its environmental improvement activities could have environmental impacts, so I would anticipate at least some problems with these projects.
Item: Reducing Wildfires Threats: $850 million for hazardous fuels removal and other efforts to prevent wildfires on public lands.
My assessment: Depends on what’s meant by “hazardous fuels removal” and “other efforts.” Recalling the Bush administration’s oxymoronic “healthy forests” initiative, I would recommend caution in accepting any Forest Service assurance that a fuels reduction project is environmentally benign.
Item: Bureau of Indian Affairs: $500 million to address maintenance backlogs at schools, dams, detention and law enforcement facilities, and over 24,000 miles of roads.
My assessment: BIA has an at-best mixed record of compliance with EIA/CRM legal requirements, and lately has not even done much of a job of consulting tribes in the course of such compliance. Many BIA facilities are historic, and programs like roads improvement have obvious potential impacts on the environment. I would anticipate problems, but they will probably be covered up.
Item: School Construction: $20 billion, including $14 billion for K-12 and $6 billion for higher education, for renovation and modernization, including technology upgrades and energy efficiency improvements.
My assessment: Funds will probably be distributed through the Deparment of Education, whose knowledge of and involvement with EIA/CRM requirements are very, very thin. Lots of potential for mistakes, screw-ups both technical and substantive. Lots of school buildings are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, so federally funded changes are subject to review under Section 106 of NHPA. I expect that money will go from DoEd to state education departments, and thence to school districts, none of whom will know the National Register from the Federal Register. The result will be that worthy and politically powerful projects will get hung up at the 11th hour when somebody discovers Section 106 and decides to ask the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) about it. SHPOs will take the blame for delaying such projects (or they’ll duck).
Item: Education Technology: $1 billion for 21st century classrooms, including computer and science labs and teacher technology training.
My assessment: To some extent, same problem as above, though much less serious.
Item: Pell Grants: $15.6 billion to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500, from $4,850 to $5,350.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: College Work-Study: $490 million to support undergraduate and graduate students who work.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Student Loan Limit Increase: Increases limits on unsubsidized Stafford loans by $2,000.
My assessment: No problem
Item: Student Aid Administration: $50 million to help the Department of Education administer surging student aid programs.
My assessment: No problem
Item: IDEA Special Education: $13 billion for formula grants to increase the federal share of special education costs and prevent these mandatory costs from forcing states to cut other areas of education.
My assessment: Probably little or no problem, except where these programs require new construction or major renovation of classrooms and other facilities.
Item: Title I Help for Disadvantaged Kids: $13 billion for grants to help disadvantaged kids in nearly every school district and more than half of all public schools reach high academic standards.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Statewide Data Systems: $250 million for competitive grants to states to design and develop data systems that analyze individual student data to find ways to improve student achievement.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Education for Homeless Children and Youth: $66 million for formula grants to states to provide services to homeless children including meals and transportation.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Improving Teacher Quality: $300 million, including $200 million for competitive grants to school districts and states to provide financial incentives for teachers and principals
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Child Care Development Block Grant: $2 billion to provide child care services .
My assessment: No problem and because these are block grants, they are unlikely to be subjected to EIA/CRM review anyway.
Item: Head Start: $2.1 billion to provide comprehensive development services to help 110,000 additional children succeed in school.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: IDEA Infants and Families: $600 million for formula grants to help states serve children with disabilities age 2 and younger.
My assessment: Could present ADA-like conflicts between accessibility and historic facilities. With experience gained in over a quarter-century’s work with ADA, these shouldn’t be difficult to resolve.
Item: Health Information Technology: $20 billion to jumpstart efforts to computerize health records to cut costs and reduce medical errors.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Prevention and Wellness Fund: $3 billion to fight preventable chronic diseases, the leading cause of deaths in the U.S., and infectious diseases.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Healthcare Effectiveness Research: $1.1 billion for Healthcare Research and Quality programs to compare the effectiveness of different medical treatments funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Health Centers: $1.5 billion, including $500 million to increase the number of uninsured Americans who receive quality healthcare and $1 billion to renovate clinics and make health information technology improvements.
My assessment: Could be conflicts where new construction and renovation are proposed. Very unlikely that such proposals have undergone EIA/CRM review. Conflicts will probably mostly go unnoticed, however.
Item: Training Primary Care Providers: $600 million to address shortages and prepare our country for universal healthcare by training primary healthcare providers including doctors, dentists, and nurses as well as helping pay medical school expenses for students who agree to practice in underserved communities through the National Health Service Corps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Indian Health Service Facilities: $550 million to modernize aging hospitals and health clinics and make healthcare technology upgrades to improve healthcare for underserved rural populations.
My assessment: Conflicts likely where aging hospitals and health clinics are historic, or hospital administrators get carried away with enlargement plans, but this is a pretty small program so problems are unlikely.
Item: Training and Employment Services: $4 billion for job training including formula grants for adult, dislocated worker, and youth services (including $1.2 billion to create up to one million summer jobs for youth).
My assessment: No problem, some opportunity (priority is to be given to training for “green” jobs).
Item: Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants: $500 million for state formula grants for construction and rehabilitation of facilities to help persons with disabilities prepare for gainful employment.
My assessment: Some potential for conflicts similar to those generated by ADA. Few if any proposed projects have probably undergone EIA/CRM review.
Item: Employment Services Grants: $500 million to match unemployed individuals to job openings through state employment service agencies and allow states to provide customized services.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Service Employment for Older Americans: $120 million to provide subsidized community service jobs to an additional 24,000 low-income older Americans.
My assessment: No problem, potential opportunity to employ older Americans in environmental and historic preservation work.
Item: Unemployment Insurance Benefits Extension: $27 billion to continue the current extended unemployment benefits program – which provides up to 33 weeks of extended benefits - through December 31, 2009 given rising unemployment.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Increased Benefits: $9 billion to increase the current average unemployment insurance benefit from roughly $300 per week, paid out of State trust funds, by $25 per week using Federal funds, through December 2009.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Unemployment Insurance Modernization: Provides funds to states though a “Reed Act” distribution, tied to states’ meeting specific reforms to increase unemployment insurance coverage for low-wage, part-time, and other jobless workers.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: COBRA Healthcare for the Unemployed: $30.3 billion to extend health insurance coverage to the unemployed.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Medicaid Coverage for the Unemployed: $8.6 billion to provide 100 percent Federal funding through 2010 for optional State Medicaid coverage of individuals (and their dependents) who are involuntarily unemployed and whose family income does not exceed a State-determined level, but is no higher than 200 percent of poverty, or who are receiving food stamps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Public Housing Capital Fund: $5 billion for building repair and modernization, including critical safety repairs.
My assessment: This program will present historic preservation advocates with something of a quandary. On the one hand, “building repair and modernization” of homes that are historic can be very destructive; on the other hand, a lot of such buildings need to be fixed up. Depending on how these funds are distributed, the people responsible for them may have no notion whatever of how to work with a historic building, or about what makes a building historic. Big potential for clashes here, I’m afraid, between interests that ought to be working in synch.
Item: HOME Investment Partnerships: $1.5 billion to help local communities build and rehabilitate low-income housing using green technologies.
My assessment: About the same as above.
Item: Native American Housing Block Grants: $500 million to rehabilitate and improve energy efficiency at some of the over 42,000 housing units maintained by Native American housing programs.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Neighborhood Stabilization: $4.2 billion to help communities purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed, vacant properties in order to create more affordable housing and reduce neighborhood blight.
My assessment: Some real potential for conflict; some of those vacant buildings may be (a) historic and (b) good for energy-efficient, cost-effective rehabilitation, but historically, the tendency of housing authorities has been to demolish and build new. Probably little EIA/CRM has been done on such projects. Probably an easy remedy in the form of program policy and procedures favoring rehabilitation, but lots of potential for conflicts as people fight over (for example) whether a dilapidated old building is eligible for the National Register.
Item: Homeless Assistance Grants: $1.5 billion for the Emergency Shelter Grant program to provide short term rental assistance, housing relocation, and stabilization services for families during the economic crisis. Funds are distributed by formula.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Rural Housing Insurance Fund: $500 million to support $22 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees to help rural families and individuals buy homes during the credit crunch.
My assessment: There’s an unresolved question about how loan and loan guarantee programs should comply with EIA/CRM requirements like NEPA and Section 106. These problems could come to a head in connection with this fund and others like it.
Item: Self-Help and Assisted Homeownership Program: $10 million for rural, high-need areas to undertake projects using sustainable and energy-efficient building and rehabilitation practices. Funds will be awarded by competition to projects that can begin
My assessment: Too vaguely defined to get much of a handle on, but also a very small program.
Item: Lead Paint: $100 million for competitive grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations to remove lead-based paint hazards in low-income housing.
My assessment: Lead paint remediation often conflicts with historic preservation, but a good deal of expertise has been developed about how to resolve such conflicts. Assuming the program is administered by knowledgeable agencies and individuals, should p0resent no serious problems.
Item: Rural Community Facilities: $200 million to support $1.2 billion in grants and loans to rural areas for critical community facilities, such as for healthcare, education, fire and rescue, day care, community centers, and libraries.
My assessment: New construction and rehab could present conflicts, probably not yet addressed through EIA/CRM review.
Item: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance: $20 billion to provide nutrition assistance to modest-income families and to lift restrictions that limit the amount of time individuals can receive food stamps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Senior Nutrition Programs: $200 million for formula grants to states for elderly nutrition services including Meals on Wheels and Congregate Meals.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Afterschool Meals: $726 million to increase the number of states that provide free dinners to children and to encourage participation by new institutions by increasing snack reimbursement rates.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Supplemental Nutrition Program Information Systems: $100 million to improve state management information systems for the WIC program.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Payments to Disabled and Elderly: $4.2 billion to help 7.5 million low-income disabled and elderly individuals with rising costs by providing an additional SSI payment in 2009.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Services Block Grant: $1 billion for grants to local communities to support employment, food, housing, and healthcare efforts serving those hardest hit by the recession.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Development Block Grants: $1 billion for community and economic development projects including housing and services for those hit hard by tough economic times.
My assessment: CDBG projects often have impacts on historic properties and other aspects of the urban environment, but my impression is that most local governments have either found ways to ignore EIA/CRM requirements or have routinized their means of dealing with them, so there will probably be no problems other than a certain amount of environmental damage.
Item: Emergency Food and Shelter: $200 million to help local community organizations provide food, shelter, and support services to the nation’s hungry, homeless, and people in economic crisis
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Low-Income Home Energy Assistance: $1 billion to help low-income families pay for home heating and cooling at a time of rising energy costs.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Child Support Enforcement: $1 billion to provide federal incentive funds for states to collect support owed to families.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Social Security Administration Disability Backlog and Claims Processing: $500 million to help the Social Security Administration process a steep rise in disability and retirement claims
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Centers for Independent Living: $200 million for state formula grants to help individuals with disabilities continue to live in their communities.
My assessment: To the extent this involves new construction and rehabilitation of centers, could present conflicts, and most projects have probably not been subjected to effective EIA/CRM review.
Item: AmeriCorps Programs: $200 million to put approximately 16,000 additional AmeriCorps members to work doing national service, meeting needs of vulnerable populations and communities during the recession.
My assessment: My guess is that AmeriCorps projects sometimes have adverse effects on the environment, but I’ve never heard of one being a source of conflict, or undergoing EIA/CRM review. So the potential for conflict is probably low.
Item: Compassion Capital Fund: $100 million for grants to faith- and community-based organizations to provide critical safety net services to needy individuals and families.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Department of Labor Worker Protection and Oversight: $80 million to ensure that worker protection laws are enforced as recovery infrastructure investments are carried out.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Medicaid Aid to States (FMAP): $87 billion to states, increasing through the end of FY 2010 the share of Medicaid costs the Federal government reimburses
My assessment: No problem.
Item: $41 billion to local school districts through Title I ($13 billion), IDEA ($13 billion), a new School Modernization and Repair Program ($14 billion), and the Education Technology program ($1 billion).
My assessment: Considerable potential for problems if these funds are used to build and modernize schools; such projects have almost certainly not gone through EIA/CRM review.
Item: $79 billion in state fiscal relief, including: $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities distributed through existing state and federal formulas; $15 billion to states as bonus grants as a reward for meeting key performance measures; and $25 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education.
My assessment: A rather ill-defined catchall, hard to get a handle on; I’m really not sure whether conflicts with EIA/CRM requirements are likely.
Item: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: $2.5 billion for block grants to help States deal with the surge in families needing help during the recession and to prevent them from cutting work programs and services for abused and neglected children.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: State and Local Law Enforcement: $4 billion to support state and local law enforcement including $3 billion for the Byrne Justice Assistance formula grants to support local law enforcement efforts with equipment and operating costs, and $1 billion for the COPS hiring grant program, to hire about 13,000 new police officers for three years.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Periodic Census and Programs, Communications: $1 billion for work necessary to ensure a successful 2010 census, including $150 million for expanded communications and outreach programs to minimize undercounting of minority groups.
My assessment: No problem.
Thomas F. King: January 17, 2009
Introduction
As of January 15, 2009, we began to get a reasonably clear view of what the Obama Administration is proposing as a package of programs to stimulate the staggering economy. The package, as outlined in a paper entitled “Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment” issued on the 14th, includes quite a number of projects and programs that could have negative effects on the human environment, both natural and cultural. This is not to say that they are not good programs and projects – only that like most things we do, they may do injury to some aspect of the environment.
For several decades we have had laws requiring that the environmental impacts of federal proposals be reviewed in an orderly manner, so that they can be lessened if feasible, sometimes avoided altogether, or at least accepted with full knowledge of what we are doing. Notable among these laws are the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). Compliance with NEPA is a type of environmental impact assessment (EIA); EIA is conducted by governments and international bodies throughout the world in an effort to control environmental damage. Compliance with Section 106 of NHPA is an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as cultural resource management (CRM) – assessing and controlling impacts on the historic and other cultural aspects of the environment.
As discussed in my forthcoming book, Our Unprotected Heritage (Left Coast Press 2009), neither EIA nor CRM is performed very well in this country, but their performance is nevertheless a suggestion that project proponents and overseers have given some thought to the impacts of their actions. Such thought-giving takes a certain amount of time; it commonly requires some study, and it should (though seldom does) involve good-faith consultation with affected parties.
Whenever the federal government proposes a new program, a new infusion of money into society, there is the danger that the time will not be taken to give the impacts of the program the consideration that caution and discretion commend. This can have costly, damaging results. This danger is exacerbated when it is perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the money must be spent quickly.
As a long-term practitioner of EIA and CRM, I thought it might be useful, both to me and to interested colleagues, to go through the proposed stimulus package piece by piece and speculate about where problems are and are not likely to arise between implementing its terms and protection of the human environment. In doing so, below, I do not pretend to offer judgments about the appropriateness of the package’s components. I merely apply my knowledge of how the EIA/CRM systems have worked in the past, in an effort to be forewarned about where problems may arise in the near future as the stimulus package goes into effect.
Below, each “item” is derived verbatim (though with explanatory material and some lengthy descriptions of low potential impact programs deleted in many cases) from the summary paper alluded to above. Each “item” is followed by my assessment of the likelihood that it will present conflicts with protection of the natural and cultural environment, sometimes with brief elaboration on the kinds of conflicts I anticipate. What to do about these conflicts will be the subject of a subsequent paper, assuming I come up with any good ideas.
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Item: Reliable, Efficient Electricity Grid: $11 billion for research and development, pilot projects, and federal matching funds for the Smart Grid Investment Program
My assessment: There is a tendency to think that “green” projects are by definition “clean” projects that have no environmental impacts. Of course, this is by no means true, but such projects often get “fast-tracked” through EIA/CRM review, without full consideration of impacts, mitigation measures, and alternatives that would reduce impacts. One result of this is unnecessary damage to the environment; another can be costly last-minute delays when some serious impact is identified too late to be dealt with effectively and too dramatically to be ignored. To the extent the projects financed by this part of the program may disturb the land, buildings, viewscapes, or neighborhoods, or introduce visual, auditory, or other elements into the environment, and to the extent they haven’t been subjected to thorough, systematic, professionally responsible and transparent EIA/CRM review, they may produce a high level of conflict and damage.
Item: Renewable Energy Loan Guarantees: $8 billion for loans for renewable energy power generation and transmission projects.
My assessment: May be a particular problem because loan guarantees are subjected at best to rather sporadic EIA/CRM review. It is easy to imagine last-minute unanticipated conflicts.
Item: GSA Federal Buildings: $6.7 billion for renovations and repairs to federal buildings including at least $6 billion focused on increasing energy efficiency and conservation.
My assessment: The quality of GSA EIA/CRM historically is rather mixed, but GSA has a high level of expertise in building management and rehabilitation, so my guess is that these projects will mostly present few problems.
Item: Local Government Energy Efficiency Block Grants: $6.9 billion to help state and local governments make investments that make them more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions.
My assessment: Block grants historically have not been subjected to federal EIA and CRM review. Whether this is good policy is debatable, but it does eliminate the potential for much technical conflict with federal EIA and CRM laws.
Item: Energy Efficiency Housing Retrofits: $2.5 billion for a new program to upgrade HUD sponsored low-income housing to increase energy efficiency, including new insulation, windows, and furnaces. Funds will be competitively awarded.
My assessment: HUD has a relatively abysmal record of EIA/CRM review, and things like window replacement are historically problematic in terms of impacts on historic buildings. My guess is that most individual projects will be of sufficiently small scale as to be non-controversial, but at minimum I’d expect a fair amount of unnecessary damage to historic buildings and neighborhoods.
Item: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Research: $2 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities to foster energy independence, reduce carbon emissions, and cut utility bills. Funds are awarded on a competitive basis to universities, companies, and national laboratories.
My assessment: Much as with the housing retrofit projects, the problems with things like demonstration projects and “deployment activities” are likely to fly below the radar of public controversy over environmental impacts. Such impacts will probably occur, but be ignored unless a university, company or national lab that fails to get funds chooses to use the EIA/CRM laws to challenge a project that IS funded.
Item: Advanced Battery Loans and Grants: $2 billion for the Advanced Battery Loan Guarantee and Grants Program, to support U.S. manufacturers of advanced vehicle batteries and battery systems.
My assessment: EIA/CRM issues might arise around the manufacture of batteries, acquisition of raw materials, and disposal of wastes, but my guess is that these will be relatively rare and controllable.
Item: Home Weatherization: $6.2 billion to help low-income families reduce their energy costs by weatherizing their homes and make our country more energy efficient.
My assessment: Same potential problems as with HUD housing retrofits. A lot will depend on how the money is distributed, and by what agencies.
Item: Smart Appliances: $300 million to provide consumers with rebates for buying energy efficient Energy Star products to replace old appliances, which will lower energy bills.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: GSA Federal Fleet: $600 million to replace older vehicles owned by the federal government with alternative fuel automobiles that will save on fuel costs and reduce carbon emissions.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: Electric Transportation: $200 million for a new grant program to encourage electric vehicle technologies.
My assessment: To the extent this mostly stimulates research in existing labs and factories, probably not a problem.
Item: Cleaning Fossil Energy: $2.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration technology demonstration projects.
My assessment: To the extent this finances modifications to existing power plants and research in laboratories, probably not a problem except to the extent it fosters a continuing reliance on coal, and hence on mining with all its adverse environmental effects.
Item: Department of Defense Research: $350 million for research into using renewable energy to power weapons systems and military bases.
My assessment: The military services have relatively robust, if not always very efficient or transparent, EIA/CRM systems, and the funding proposed here won’t support much, so I would anticipate few problems.
Item: Alternative Buses and Trucks: $400 million to help state and local governments purchase efficient alternative fuel vehicles to reduce fuel costs and carbon emissions.
My assessment: Probably few problems.
Item: Industrial Energy Efficiency: $500 million for energy efficient manufacturing demonstration projects.
My assessment: To the extent this involves upgrading the efficiency of existing factories, probably few problems.
Item: Diesel Emissions Reduction: $300 million for grants and loans to state and local governments for projects that reduce diesel emissions.
My assessment: Probably few problems, but the description is too vague to allow much confidence.
Item: Wireless and Broadband Grants: $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas.
My assessment: Probably not a problem except to the extent it results in expansion of fiber-optic networks that require trenching and other potentially environmentally damaging activities. These are usually small-scale impacts, however, which should be fairly easily handled IF they are identified in a timely manner.
Item: National Science Foundation: $3 billion, including … $400 million to build major research facilities that perform cutting edge science, $300 million for major research equipment shared by institutions of higher education and other scientists, (and) $200 million to repair and modernize science and engineering research facilities.
My assessment: NSF, probably because it assumes that whatever it does is “good,” has a rotten track record in EIA/CRM. Wherever NSF funds new construction or renovation, there is the potential for unconsidered EIA/CRM conflicts. The rest of the $3 billion is to be allocated to relatively innocuous activities that should have few if any impacts.
Item: National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research: $2 billion, including $1.5 billion for …biomedical research… and $500 million to implement the repair and improvement strategic plan developed by the NIH for its campuses.
My assessment: No likely problems except with the $500 million campus upgrade – which also may not be a problem IF the strategic plan has been subjected to responsible EIA/CRM. This is by no means assured, however.
Item: University Research Facilities: $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.
My assessment: Universities are well known for their insensitivity to some EIA/CRM issues, notably historic preservation and respect for neighborhoods surrounding university campuses. To the extent this program funds improvements to existing facilities, the problems will probably be minimal, but new construction could trigger serious conflicts.
Item: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $462 million to enable CDC to complete its Buildings and Facilities Master Plan, as well as renovations and construction needs of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
My assessment: The potential for conflict depends on whether and how well the Master Plan and NIOSH construction plans have been subjected to responsible EIA/CRM review.
Item: Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences
My assessment: To the extent this supports research in existing labs, probably few problems.
Item: NASA: $600 million, including $400 (for) climate change research, $150 million for research, development, and demonstration to improve aviation safety and Next Generation air traffic control (NextGen); and $50 million to repair NASA centers damaged by hurricanes and floods last year.
My assessment: NASA is another “good” agency with a rotten record of EIA/CRM review, but to the extent this funding supports research with existing facilities and spacecraft, it should produce few problems.
Item: Biomedical Advanced Research and Development, Pandemic Flu, and Cyber Security: $900 million to prepare for a pandemic influenza.
My assessment: Probably no problems.
Item: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites and Sensors: $600 million for satellite development and acquisitions, including climate sensors and climate modeling.
My assessment: Probably no problems.
Item: National Institute of Standards and Technology: $300 million for competitive construction grants for research science buildings at colleges, universities, and other research organizations…
My assessment: The proposed grant recipients typically do a bad job of considering EIA/CRM issues, and NIST has little or no experience with EIA/CRM. As a result there may well be conflicts, though the program is small enough that it will probably result in a lot of relatively small grants with low potential for impacts.
Item: Agricultural Research Service: $209 million for agricultural research facilities across the country.
My assessment: This money will apparently be used mostly to correct problems arising from deferred maintenance on existing facilities, so probably won’t present many problems.
Item: U.S. Geological Survey: $200 million to repair and modernize U.S.G.S. science facilities and equipment.
My assessment: A pretty small program, probably little potential for problems.
Item: Small Business Credit: $430 million for new direct lending and loan guarantee authorities.
My assessment: Will probably finance some environmentally damaging activities, but SBA has mostly gotten away without much if any EIA/CRM review in the past, and will probably continue to do so.
Item: Rural Business-Cooperative Service: $100 million for rural business grants and loans to guarantee $2 billion in loans for rural businesses.
My assessment: “Rural businesses” like industrial agriculture can have a wide range of environmental impacts, which tend to be rather poorly managed, so the potential for uncontrolled environmental impact by this program is probably high, but the potential for controversy and conflict is probably low because such impacts tend to occur where no one is really watching.
Item: Industrial Technology Services: $100 million, including $70 million for the Technology Innovation Program to accelerate research in potentially revolutionary technologies … and $30 million for the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships to help small and mid-size manufacturers compete globally by providing them with access to technology.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Economic Development Assistance: $250 million to address long-term economic distress in urban industrial cores and rural areas. EDA leverages $10 in private investments for $1 in federal funds.
My assessment: A small program with big potential impacts on the environment because of its leveraging effects. To the extent projects it funds get EIA/CRM attention at all, they are likely to raise contentious issues concerning the extent to which the federal tail can wag the dog of a mostly non-federal development project.
Item: DTV Conversion Coupons: $650 million to continue the coupon program to enable American households to convert from analog television transmission to digital transmission.
My assessment: No problem except what’s going to happen to all those old TVs?
Item: Highway Infrastructure: $30 billion for highway and bridge construction projects.
My assessment: In an informal poll of state department of transportation (DOT) environmental staff, most reported that they had plenty of “shovel-ready” projects that had completed EIA/CRM review, but in some states (notably in the south) it appears that EIA/CRM review is not initiated until federal funds are in hand. A project in this condition shouldn’t be regarded as “shovel-ready,” but many probably will be, and could present serious conflicts if environmental and cultural resource issues arise at the “last minute.” There is also the question of the quality of the EIA/CRM work done on some ostensibly shovel-ready projects, particularly where such work was done either long ago or in the latter part of the Bush administration, during which EIA/CRM standards tended to be relaxed throughout the government.
Item: Transit New Construction: $1 billion for Capital Investment Grants for new commuter rail or other light rail systems to increase public use of mass transit and to speed projects already in construction.
My assessment: This will apparently be a Federal Transit Administration program; FTA’s handling of EIA/CRM matters tends to be pretty flaccid, so the potential for unresolved impacts and conflicts is probably pretty high.
Item: Transit Upgrades and Repair: $2 billion to modernize existing transit systems, including renovations to stations, security systems, computers, equipment, structures, signals, and communications. Funds will be distributed through the existing formula.
My assessment: Fairly high likelihood of impacts on historic rail facilities, stations, etc., which have probably not been thoroughly assessed.
Item: Transit Capital Assistance: $6 billion to purchase buses and equipment needed to increase public transportation and improve intermodal and transit facilities.
My assessment: Probably little danger of problems.
Item: Amtrak and Intercity Passenger Rail Construction Grants: $1.1 billion to improve the speed and capacity of intercity passenger rail service.
My assessment: May be some conflicts with historic facilities along Northeast Corridor, but such facilities are relatively well known, so there shouldn’t be a lot of unexpected problems.
Item: Transportation Security Administration Explosive Detection Systems: $500 million to install Aviation Explosive Detection Systems in the nation’s airports:
My assessment: Little danger of problems.
Item: Coast Guard Bridges: $150 million for ready-to-go investments to repair or remove bridges deemed hazardous to marine navigation.
My assessment: Depends on what the Coast Guard means by “ready-to-go.” If achieving this happy state includes completing responsible EIA/CRM work, there should be few problems, but this may be a big “if.”
Item: Social Security Administration Modernization: $400 million to replace the 30 year old Social Security Administration’s National Computer Center.
My assessment: Depends on whether this involves new construction or just upgrading equipment. New construction could present problems, but assuming that GSA will do the modernizing, there’s a reasonable chance that EIA/CRM issues are under control.
Item: Farm Service Agency: $245 million for critical IT improvements to systems that have been unable to handle workload increases.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: State Department Technology: $276 million to upgrade and modernize information technology platform.
My assessment: Probably not a problem.
Item: Department of Agriculture: $44 million for repairs and security improvements at USDA’s headquarters.
My assessment: My impression is that this project has been on GSA’s books for years, so EIA/CRM issues are probably under control.
Item: DOD Medical Facilities: $3.75 billion for new construction of hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers, and $455 million in renovations.
My assessment: Lots of potential for environmental/cultural impacts, but there is a fairly good chance that DOD has completed a responsible program of EIA/CRM, albeit perhaps with little public involvement.
Item: Facilities Renovations: $2.1 billion to address needed repairs to military facilities.
My assessment: Same as above, and special potential for problems if any renovations are to be carried out overseas, where pertinent US EIA/CRM laws have limited applicability.
Item: Troop Housing: $1.2 billion for new construction and $154 million for renovations to improve housing for our troops.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Child Development Center: $360 million for new child development centers.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Guard and Reserve: $400 million for new construction to support Guard and Reserve units across the country with operations and training facilities and utilities infrastructure.
My assessment: Same as above, with complications arising from likely questions about the relationship between federal and state programs/responsibilities/authorities.
Item: Veterans Medical Facilities: $950 million for veterans’ medical facilities.
My assessment: VA is playing catch up on its EIA/CRM responsibilities, toward which it has not very vigorously applied itself in the past. I anticipate serious conflicts here. In the interests of full disclosure, the reader should know that I am under contract to assist VA with resolving some existing CRM problems.
Item: Veterans Cemeteries: $50 million to put people to work making monument and memorial repairs at cemeteries.
My assessment: Depends on whether we’re talking here about literally just fixing monuments and memorials, which should have pretty limited impacts, or whether VA will include more extensive renovation/expansion of cemeteries. The latter could create serious impacts and controversies.
Item: Border Ports of Entry: $1.15 billion to construct GSA and Customs and Border Patrol land ports.
My assessment: This has been a GSA priority for some years, and it’s likely that some kind of EIA/CRM review has been completed on each project. Whether it’s been done well is another matter.
Item: Job Corps Facilities: $300 million to upgrade job training facilities serving at-risk youth while improving energy efficiency.
My assessment: Depends substantially on what agency will do the upgrading, but in any event we’re probably looking at relatively minor changes to existing facilities, so the problems may be limited.
Item: Construction on Public Lands and Parks: $1.8 billion for the National Park Service, $325 million for the Bureau of Land Management, $300 million for the National Wildlife Refuges and National Fish Hatcheries, and $650 million for the Forest Service.
My assessment: A good deal of potential for poorly defined and controlled impacts on the environment, both natural and cultural. Though NPS, BLM, FWS and FS have fairly robust programs of EIA/CRM, all have deteriorated in recent years, and have suffered from ill-advised though understandable efforts to “streamline” review in ways that have tended to reduce comprehensiveness and transparency.
Item: National Treasures: $400 million, including $200 million to address the deterioration of the National Mall; $150 million to address the repair backlog at the Smithsonian; and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
My assessment: National Mall repairs have almost surely undergone extensive review by a variety of planning bodies, so probably present few problems. The Smithsonian insists that it is not a federal agency whenever it is urged to comply with federal EIA/CRM laws, so the likelihood of undefined and very much unresolved conflicts over Smithsonian repairs may be high (depending on the scale and character of the repairs). NEA may have sporadic impacts on the environment, which almost certainly have not been properly identified and addressed.
Item: Clean Water State Revolving Fund: $6 billion for loans to help communities upgrade wastewater treatment systems.
My assessment: Considerable potential for impacts through improvement/extension of wastewater facilities. No idea to what extent the projects likely to be funded have undergone EIA/CRM review.
Item: Drinking Water State Revolving Fund: $2 billion for loans for drinking water infrastructure.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Rural Water and Waste Disposal: $1.5 billion to support $3.8 billion in grants and loans to help communities fund drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Corps of Engineers: $4.5 billion for environmental restoration, flood protection, hydropower, and navigation infrastructure critical to the economy.
My assessment: The Civil Works side of the Corps has a well-developed EIA/CRM program (as opposed to the Regulatory side, which is a poster child for mindless pseudo-compliance with EIA/CRM laws). I would not anticipate many problems with these projects.
Item: Bureau of Reclamation: $500 million to provide clean, reliable drinking water to rural areas and to ensure adequate water supply to western localities impacted by drought.
My assessment: Essentially the same as the various EPA water and wastewater programs.
Item: Watershed Infrastructure: $400 million for the Natural Resources Conservation Service watershed improvement programs to design and build flood protection and water quality projects, repair aging dams, and purchase and restore conservation easements in river flood zones.
My assessment: If these projects are parts of an NRCS backlog, they have probably undergone some level of EIA/CRM review, but my impression is that the quality of such review varies widely from area to area. My guess is that there will be few problems as the result of such a small infusion of money, however.
Item: International Boundary and Water Commission: $224 million to repair flood control systems along the international segment of the Rio Grande damaged by hurricane Katrina and other serious storms.
My assessment: Probably under control, particularly assuming FEMA involvement.
Item: Superfund Hazardous Waste Cleanup: $800 million to clean up hazardous and toxic waste sites that threaten health and the environment.
My assessment: Serious potential for destructive, costly, controversial conflicts. EPA (at least half the time) argues that it need not comply with EIA/CRM laws when it does Superfund cleanup, because the law (CERCLA) ostensibly exempts the agency from such laws. This is hardly true, but the law (CERCLA) is inartfully written, and EPA pretty regularly gets away without considering environmental impacts, or with considering them in very strange, usually highly inefficient, ineffective, and opaque ways. I seriously doubt if many projects to be funded out of this (admittedly small) pot have been responsibly subjected to EIA/CRM review. The organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has recently presented evidence of the damage EPA is doing to EPA’s Inspector General, requesting review. PEER’s arguments appear to me to be well founded.
Item: Leaking Underground Storage Tanks: $200 million for enforcement and cleanup of petroleum leaks from underground storage tanks at approximately 1,600 additional sites.
My assessment: Most of the projects that will be funded probably present few problems, but I question how well they have been examined for environmental and cultural resource impacts.
Item: Nuclear Waste Cleanup: $500 million for nuclear waste cleanup at sites contaminated as a result of the nation’s past nuclear activities.
My assessment: The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission routinely carry out what they interpret as EIA/CRM review, but it tends to be minimalist and hampered by over-lawyerly interpretations of their responsibilities. Such a small infusion of money will probably not make things notably worse than they are already, however.
Item: Closed Military Bases: $300 million for cleanup activities at closed military installations allowing local communities to redevelop these properties for productive use.
My assessment: Cleanup per se is probably not a serious issue, though the uses that may be allowed as a result may be another matter.
Item: NOAA Habitat Restoration: $400 million for ready-to-go habitat restoration projects.
My assessment: Depends on what “ready-to-go” means to NOAA.
Item: Brownfields: $100 million for competitive grants for evaluation and cleanup of former industrial and commercial sites.
My assessment: Some such sites are historically and archaeologically important, and some doubtless have other environmental values. EPA tends to be reluctant to acknowledge that its environmental improvement activities could have environmental impacts, so I would anticipate at least some problems with these projects.
Item: Reducing Wildfires Threats: $850 million for hazardous fuels removal and other efforts to prevent wildfires on public lands.
My assessment: Depends on what’s meant by “hazardous fuels removal” and “other efforts.” Recalling the Bush administration’s oxymoronic “healthy forests” initiative, I would recommend caution in accepting any Forest Service assurance that a fuels reduction project is environmentally benign.
Item: Bureau of Indian Affairs: $500 million to address maintenance backlogs at schools, dams, detention and law enforcement facilities, and over 24,000 miles of roads.
My assessment: BIA has an at-best mixed record of compliance with EIA/CRM legal requirements, and lately has not even done much of a job of consulting tribes in the course of such compliance. Many BIA facilities are historic, and programs like roads improvement have obvious potential impacts on the environment. I would anticipate problems, but they will probably be covered up.
Item: School Construction: $20 billion, including $14 billion for K-12 and $6 billion for higher education, for renovation and modernization, including technology upgrades and energy efficiency improvements.
My assessment: Funds will probably be distributed through the Deparment of Education, whose knowledge of and involvement with EIA/CRM requirements are very, very thin. Lots of potential for mistakes, screw-ups both technical and substantive. Lots of school buildings are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, so federally funded changes are subject to review under Section 106 of NHPA. I expect that money will go from DoEd to state education departments, and thence to school districts, none of whom will know the National Register from the Federal Register. The result will be that worthy and politically powerful projects will get hung up at the 11th hour when somebody discovers Section 106 and decides to ask the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) about it. SHPOs will take the blame for delaying such projects (or they’ll duck).
Item: Education Technology: $1 billion for 21st century classrooms, including computer and science labs and teacher technology training.
My assessment: To some extent, same problem as above, though much less serious.
Item: Pell Grants: $15.6 billion to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500, from $4,850 to $5,350.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: College Work-Study: $490 million to support undergraduate and graduate students who work.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Student Loan Limit Increase: Increases limits on unsubsidized Stafford loans by $2,000.
My assessment: No problem
Item: Student Aid Administration: $50 million to help the Department of Education administer surging student aid programs.
My assessment: No problem
Item: IDEA Special Education: $13 billion for formula grants to increase the federal share of special education costs and prevent these mandatory costs from forcing states to cut other areas of education.
My assessment: Probably little or no problem, except where these programs require new construction or major renovation of classrooms and other facilities.
Item: Title I Help for Disadvantaged Kids: $13 billion for grants to help disadvantaged kids in nearly every school district and more than half of all public schools reach high academic standards.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Statewide Data Systems: $250 million for competitive grants to states to design and develop data systems that analyze individual student data to find ways to improve student achievement.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Education for Homeless Children and Youth: $66 million for formula grants to states to provide services to homeless children including meals and transportation.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Improving Teacher Quality: $300 million, including $200 million for competitive grants to school districts and states to provide financial incentives for teachers and principals
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Child Care Development Block Grant: $2 billion to provide child care services .
My assessment: No problem and because these are block grants, they are unlikely to be subjected to EIA/CRM review anyway.
Item: Head Start: $2.1 billion to provide comprehensive development services to help 110,000 additional children succeed in school.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: IDEA Infants and Families: $600 million for formula grants to help states serve children with disabilities age 2 and younger.
My assessment: Could present ADA-like conflicts between accessibility and historic facilities. With experience gained in over a quarter-century’s work with ADA, these shouldn’t be difficult to resolve.
Item: Health Information Technology: $20 billion to jumpstart efforts to computerize health records to cut costs and reduce medical errors.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Prevention and Wellness Fund: $3 billion to fight preventable chronic diseases, the leading cause of deaths in the U.S., and infectious diseases.
My assessment: Probably no problem.
Item: Healthcare Effectiveness Research: $1.1 billion for Healthcare Research and Quality programs to compare the effectiveness of different medical treatments funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Health Centers: $1.5 billion, including $500 million to increase the number of uninsured Americans who receive quality healthcare and $1 billion to renovate clinics and make health information technology improvements.
My assessment: Could be conflicts where new construction and renovation are proposed. Very unlikely that such proposals have undergone EIA/CRM review. Conflicts will probably mostly go unnoticed, however.
Item: Training Primary Care Providers: $600 million to address shortages and prepare our country for universal healthcare by training primary healthcare providers including doctors, dentists, and nurses as well as helping pay medical school expenses for students who agree to practice in underserved communities through the National Health Service Corps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Indian Health Service Facilities: $550 million to modernize aging hospitals and health clinics and make healthcare technology upgrades to improve healthcare for underserved rural populations.
My assessment: Conflicts likely where aging hospitals and health clinics are historic, or hospital administrators get carried away with enlargement plans, but this is a pretty small program so problems are unlikely.
Item: Training and Employment Services: $4 billion for job training including formula grants for adult, dislocated worker, and youth services (including $1.2 billion to create up to one million summer jobs for youth).
My assessment: No problem, some opportunity (priority is to be given to training for “green” jobs).
Item: Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants: $500 million for state formula grants for construction and rehabilitation of facilities to help persons with disabilities prepare for gainful employment.
My assessment: Some potential for conflicts similar to those generated by ADA. Few if any proposed projects have probably undergone EIA/CRM review.
Item: Employment Services Grants: $500 million to match unemployed individuals to job openings through state employment service agencies and allow states to provide customized services.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Service Employment for Older Americans: $120 million to provide subsidized community service jobs to an additional 24,000 low-income older Americans.
My assessment: No problem, potential opportunity to employ older Americans in environmental and historic preservation work.
Item: Unemployment Insurance Benefits Extension: $27 billion to continue the current extended unemployment benefits program – which provides up to 33 weeks of extended benefits - through December 31, 2009 given rising unemployment.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Increased Benefits: $9 billion to increase the current average unemployment insurance benefit from roughly $300 per week, paid out of State trust funds, by $25 per week using Federal funds, through December 2009.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Unemployment Insurance Modernization: Provides funds to states though a “Reed Act” distribution, tied to states’ meeting specific reforms to increase unemployment insurance coverage for low-wage, part-time, and other jobless workers.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: COBRA Healthcare for the Unemployed: $30.3 billion to extend health insurance coverage to the unemployed.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Medicaid Coverage for the Unemployed: $8.6 billion to provide 100 percent Federal funding through 2010 for optional State Medicaid coverage of individuals (and their dependents) who are involuntarily unemployed and whose family income does not exceed a State-determined level, but is no higher than 200 percent of poverty, or who are receiving food stamps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Public Housing Capital Fund: $5 billion for building repair and modernization, including critical safety repairs.
My assessment: This program will present historic preservation advocates with something of a quandary. On the one hand, “building repair and modernization” of homes that are historic can be very destructive; on the other hand, a lot of such buildings need to be fixed up. Depending on how these funds are distributed, the people responsible for them may have no notion whatever of how to work with a historic building, or about what makes a building historic. Big potential for clashes here, I’m afraid, between interests that ought to be working in synch.
Item: HOME Investment Partnerships: $1.5 billion to help local communities build and rehabilitate low-income housing using green technologies.
My assessment: About the same as above.
Item: Native American Housing Block Grants: $500 million to rehabilitate and improve energy efficiency at some of the over 42,000 housing units maintained by Native American housing programs.
My assessment: Same as above.
Item: Neighborhood Stabilization: $4.2 billion to help communities purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed, vacant properties in order to create more affordable housing and reduce neighborhood blight.
My assessment: Some real potential for conflict; some of those vacant buildings may be (a) historic and (b) good for energy-efficient, cost-effective rehabilitation, but historically, the tendency of housing authorities has been to demolish and build new. Probably little EIA/CRM has been done on such projects. Probably an easy remedy in the form of program policy and procedures favoring rehabilitation, but lots of potential for conflicts as people fight over (for example) whether a dilapidated old building is eligible for the National Register.
Item: Homeless Assistance Grants: $1.5 billion for the Emergency Shelter Grant program to provide short term rental assistance, housing relocation, and stabilization services for families during the economic crisis. Funds are distributed by formula.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Rural Housing Insurance Fund: $500 million to support $22 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees to help rural families and individuals buy homes during the credit crunch.
My assessment: There’s an unresolved question about how loan and loan guarantee programs should comply with EIA/CRM requirements like NEPA and Section 106. These problems could come to a head in connection with this fund and others like it.
Item: Self-Help and Assisted Homeownership Program: $10 million for rural, high-need areas to undertake projects using sustainable and energy-efficient building and rehabilitation practices. Funds will be awarded by competition to projects that can begin
My assessment: Too vaguely defined to get much of a handle on, but also a very small program.
Item: Lead Paint: $100 million for competitive grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations to remove lead-based paint hazards in low-income housing.
My assessment: Lead paint remediation often conflicts with historic preservation, but a good deal of expertise has been developed about how to resolve such conflicts. Assuming the program is administered by knowledgeable agencies and individuals, should p0resent no serious problems.
Item: Rural Community Facilities: $200 million to support $1.2 billion in grants and loans to rural areas for critical community facilities, such as for healthcare, education, fire and rescue, day care, community centers, and libraries.
My assessment: New construction and rehab could present conflicts, probably not yet addressed through EIA/CRM review.
Item: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance: $20 billion to provide nutrition assistance to modest-income families and to lift restrictions that limit the amount of time individuals can receive food stamps.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Senior Nutrition Programs: $200 million for formula grants to states for elderly nutrition services including Meals on Wheels and Congregate Meals.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Afterschool Meals: $726 million to increase the number of states that provide free dinners to children and to encourage participation by new institutions by increasing snack reimbursement rates.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Supplemental Nutrition Program Information Systems: $100 million to improve state management information systems for the WIC program.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Payments to Disabled and Elderly: $4.2 billion to help 7.5 million low-income disabled and elderly individuals with rising costs by providing an additional SSI payment in 2009.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Services Block Grant: $1 billion for grants to local communities to support employment, food, housing, and healthcare efforts serving those hardest hit by the recession.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Community Development Block Grants: $1 billion for community and economic development projects including housing and services for those hit hard by tough economic times.
My assessment: CDBG projects often have impacts on historic properties and other aspects of the urban environment, but my impression is that most local governments have either found ways to ignore EIA/CRM requirements or have routinized their means of dealing with them, so there will probably be no problems other than a certain amount of environmental damage.
Item: Emergency Food and Shelter: $200 million to help local community organizations provide food, shelter, and support services to the nation’s hungry, homeless, and people in economic crisis
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Low-Income Home Energy Assistance: $1 billion to help low-income families pay for home heating and cooling at a time of rising energy costs.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Child Support Enforcement: $1 billion to provide federal incentive funds for states to collect support owed to families.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Social Security Administration Disability Backlog and Claims Processing: $500 million to help the Social Security Administration process a steep rise in disability and retirement claims
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Centers for Independent Living: $200 million for state formula grants to help individuals with disabilities continue to live in their communities.
My assessment: To the extent this involves new construction and rehabilitation of centers, could present conflicts, and most projects have probably not been subjected to effective EIA/CRM review.
Item: AmeriCorps Programs: $200 million to put approximately 16,000 additional AmeriCorps members to work doing national service, meeting needs of vulnerable populations and communities during the recession.
My assessment: My guess is that AmeriCorps projects sometimes have adverse effects on the environment, but I’ve never heard of one being a source of conflict, or undergoing EIA/CRM review. So the potential for conflict is probably low.
Item: Compassion Capital Fund: $100 million for grants to faith- and community-based organizations to provide critical safety net services to needy individuals and families.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Department of Labor Worker Protection and Oversight: $80 million to ensure that worker protection laws are enforced as recovery infrastructure investments are carried out.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Medicaid Aid to States (FMAP): $87 billion to states, increasing through the end of FY 2010 the share of Medicaid costs the Federal government reimburses
My assessment: No problem.
Item: $41 billion to local school districts through Title I ($13 billion), IDEA ($13 billion), a new School Modernization and Repair Program ($14 billion), and the Education Technology program ($1 billion).
My assessment: Considerable potential for problems if these funds are used to build and modernize schools; such projects have almost certainly not gone through EIA/CRM review.
Item: $79 billion in state fiscal relief, including: $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities distributed through existing state and federal formulas; $15 billion to states as bonus grants as a reward for meeting key performance measures; and $25 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education.
My assessment: A rather ill-defined catchall, hard to get a handle on; I’m really not sure whether conflicts with EIA/CRM requirements are likely.
Item: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: $2.5 billion for block grants to help States deal with the surge in families needing help during the recession and to prevent them from cutting work programs and services for abused and neglected children.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: State and Local Law Enforcement: $4 billion to support state and local law enforcement including $3 billion for the Byrne Justice Assistance formula grants to support local law enforcement efforts with equipment and operating costs, and $1 billion for the COPS hiring grant program, to hire about 13,000 new police officers for three years.
My assessment: No problem.
Item: Periodic Census and Programs, Communications: $1 billion for work necessary to ensure a successful 2010 census, including $150 million for expanded communications and outreach programs to minimize undercounting of minority groups.
My assessment: No problem.
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