Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
must not proceed as proposed because of one or more of the follow-
ing conditions:
-
A national environmental standard violation or inconsistency is
substantive and/or will occur on a long-term basis or over a large
geographic area.
-
In the case where no applicable standard exists, the severity,
duration, or geographical scope of the predicted impact warrants
special attention.
-
The predicted adverse impacts are a significant threat to national
environmental resources or contradictory to environmental policies.
EPA coordination of NEPA compliance, and particularly the draft EIS rating
system, has generally worked well in evaluating EISs but as discussed below
there is much room for improvement in the quality of EISs, and the environ-
mental sustainability of proposed federal actions. The EIS rating system has
the potential to support development and implementation of a standard level
of investigation and accepted impact prediction methodology consistent across
agencies. The establishment of standard and accepted practices has been a ben-
efit to agencies and the courts alike because the CEQ Regulations (§1502.22)
require collection of the necessary information to conduct the impact analysis
if the “costs of obtaining it are not exorbitant.” Such a requirement is subject
to differing interpretation and a history of comments from qualified environ-
mental analysis practitioners on EISs for 25 years to determine whether the
information and analysis methods are adequate makes it a much more objec-
tive determination. It is a wise NEPA practitioner who reviews EISs on similar
projects to determine which approaches are rated adequate and which are not
when they plan, scope, and execute an environmental analysis.
The EPA ratings and EPA comment letters authorized under Section 309
of the Clean Air Act are posted for each EIS submitted by a federal agency
(http://yosemite.epa.gov/oeca/webeis.nsf/viEIS01?OpenView, Environmental
Impact Statement Data Base). This database demonstrates how deeply NEPA
has penetrated the functioning of several federal agencies. From July 1, 2007
to June 30, 2012, 2500 EISs were filed by all federal agencies (Table 2.4) and just
over half of these were draft EISs. The number filed per year was relatively
constant but during the period, 24 were the fewest filed in a month (about one
a day), 65 were the most (three a day), and the average over the period was 42
per month. So NEPA practitioners and their environmental consultants filed
approximately 10 EISs a week over the period and although a precise count is
not available, the number of EAs and other NEPA documents has been esti-
mated at 10-20 times that number.
There is a marked difference in the number of filings per agency over the
five-year period (Figure 2.1 and Table 2.5). Of the 2500 EISs, four agencies
accounted for over half of all the EISs during the period (U.S. Forest Service,
608; Federal Highway Administration, 296; Bureau of Land Management, 241;
and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 203). On the other hand, there were nine
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