Feb. 11 Update: I’ve included the actual Power Point Presentation below. Below are my notes from the CTAEP February meeting entitled “FHWA Every Day Counts Initiative and Related TxDOT Efforts”. The presenter was Dianna Noble, Director of TxDOT’s Environmental Affairs Division. Dianna’s talk focused not on streamlining (because everyone is tired of “streamlining” efforts [...]
Archive | NEPA News RSS feed for this section
NEPA and Climate Change: Things Are Starting to Heat Up
With the issue of climate change growing in importance both nationally and globally, we were curious how the topic is being treated in NEPA environmental impact statements. The U.S. EPA does not currently have standards or regulations for greenhouse gases like CO2, but draft guidelines have been issued. To get a sample, we looked at [...]
Can Environmental Assessments Add Value?
This topic is a bit off the normal path for Plannovation, but I wanted to highlight some interesting research done by Peter Havens, Charles Morgan, and Donald MacDonald on environmental planning for new ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) projects. Now I know next to nothing about OTEC projects, but I was struck by a unique [...]
For NEPA Nerds, TRB’s discussion of NEPA 50% faster
So what’s going on with NEPA 50% faster initiative? Joe Shalkowski, Associate VP of Transportation Planning at PBS&J, attended the annual TRB meeting in January. Joe reported on what the TRB discussed to reduce the timeframe of the transportation project development process by 50% to the Austin subchapter of the Texas Association of Environmental Professionals. [...]
Indirect Impacts in Recent Transportation EISs and EAs
While uploading documents to the Cubit NEPA Library, I researched 30 transportation EIS and EAs from various states that were published in 2009 or early 2010, focusing on the indirect impact section of the documents. The chart below shows what types of indirect impacts the documents discussed. What I learned from my unscientific Indirect Impacts [...]
