Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer the bipartisan Denham-Costa amendment which eliminates duplication of environmental reviews. The MAP-21 highway bill created the NEPA assignment program in 2012, which allows States to assume responsibility for environmental review, consultation, and compliance of NEPA for Federal aid highway projects and other transportation projects. The program removes an entire layer of Federal bureaucracy from the NEPA process, allowing States and counties to operate more efficiently. NEPA assignment has been a success, saving time and cost of infrastructure projects across six States: California, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Utah, and Alaska. Two more States, Arizona and Nebraska, are in the process of applying, and all 50 States are eligible to participate. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee built on the success of the NEPA assignment program in the 2015 FAST Act by establishing the NEPA reciprocity program. The NEPA reciprocity program allows States with environmental laws that are at least as stringent as NEPA to make the approval of reviews under State laws and regulations and in replacement of NEPA. This allows States to remove parallel and redundant NEPA requirements from their own environmental process, which will get projects built faster and at a lower cost. In other words, this not only allows one environmental review, but stops us from doing two.…”