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Monday, September 01, 2008
Environmental Policy Pollutes Local Budgets
By Richard Vaughan
Retired Engineer
The city's ineptitude in handling engineering contracts as noted in your Aug. 19 editorial "Transit's Fiscal Controls Take Taxpayers for Ride" has deeper roots than negligence.
"How else can you explain handing over around $438,000 for work that was never done?" the editorial asked.
I can't explain the $438,000 but I can shed light on at least $387,000.
The engineering firm was given the job of preparing an environmental impact statement for a transit system on Central Avenue, and, as the editorial noted, "It never completed the EIS but was paid $387,000 anyway."
Some background: The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 established the requirement for environmental impact statements (EIS) for major actions of the federal government.
Remember the operative word, "major."
The purpose of NEPA was to promote informed decision-making by making "detailed information concerning significant environmental impacts" available to both agency leaders and the public.
NEPA was a good act because in many cases it was enforced for "major" projects. Then came the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, a federal law that tied highway and transit funding to collaborative planning requirements, giving significant additional powers to metropolitan planning organizations.
After that law was put into effect, the reference in NEPA to "major" projects went away. Any project of any size that had any federal funds, no matter how minor, required an environmental assessment and, all too often, an EIS.
So think about how the shifting interpretation of those two laws has caused useless expenditures:
1. Do you really think U.S. 66 — the major highway through Albuquerque since the 1930s that once had trolley cars running from Old Town to Downtown — really needed a $387,000 study on re-installing trolley cars? What did they expect to find? A bats nest in a light pole?
2. Do you really think the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District needed a $42,000 environmental assessment (EA) to determine whether it could repair a failing levee in the South Valley?
3. Do you really believe a $2,000 EA of paved medians on University SE between Coal and Stadium was a prerequisite to their being landscaped?
4. Do you really believe that the county needed a $2,500 EA on an unsafe one-lane bridge on Coyote Springs Road?
None of the above are what one would call "major" projects of the federal government, yet the money is wasted day after day all over this country for meaningless engineering studies. The tragedy is that no one is bothered by the waste. It's just considered part of the cost of doing business.
So not only did the city blow $367,000 on an engineering contract, but it blew $367,000 on a useless study the answer to which was already known: Recommend that the project be built.
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