AASHTO Journal, 20 September 2013
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), met Wednesday to discuss the various provisions in the current transportation law, MAP-21, that dealt with speeding up project delivery for transportation projects across the country.
The hearing, “Implementing MAP-21’s Provisions to Accelerate Project Delivery,” featured testimony from U.S. Transportation Department Deputy Secretary John Porcari, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel Ashe, Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Helen Sutley, and USDOT Assistant Inspector General for Highway and Transit Audits Joseph Comé.
Boxer opened up the hearing by touting the various policy changes in MAP-21 that lead to faster project delivery, stating the positive effects that can already be seen.
“I believe that these provisions will have a meaningful impact to help deliver thoroughly reviewed transportation projects more quickly,” Boxer said in her opening statement. “In fact, we have already seen tangible benefits from projects that have utilized the MAP-21 provisions. For example, following the collapse of the Interstate 5 bridge in Washington State earlier this year, state officials were able to utilize one of the MAP-21 provisions, a new categorical exclusion for emergency repairs of roads and bridges damaged in a disaster, which allowed for a very fast repair and rebuilding of a permanent span across the Skagit River.” (See related AASHTO Journal story on the completion of the new bridge span here.)
And while most were in agreement that speeding up project delivery for transportation projects was a positive thing, many acknowledged the difficulty in implementing all the changes set forth in MAP-21 by the time the bill would be up for reauthorization in September 2014.
“We thank the committee for MAP-21 which has a lot of great innovations in it, but there are approximately 100 mandates and somewhere between 50 and 60 rulemakings embedded in MAP-21,” Porcari said. “What we have done is prioritize those. We talked about the emergency relief provision being one of the most important. We are developing dates and timelines for all of those and we’ve tried to do that in a priority way. I would point out that the staff doing this work is the same staff that is working on the permits rapid response team and we don’t want to deter them from getting projects out the door.”
Additional information on the Senate EPW Committee hearing on MAP-21’s project delivery provisions is available here.