Recent Efforts to Streamline Restoration Permitting: Why it matters

By: Grace Edinger

Ecological restoration projects are often as difficult, if not more so, to permit than development. There are multiple regulatory agencies, exorbitant costs, and often years of time needed to secure proper permits. Obviously, this is a barrier for restoration work. Smaller firms and local efforts often do not have the money, time, or technical expertise to navigate this difficult process and will either abandon or avoid projects because of permitting red tape. Our ecological crises are on tight timelines; we don’t have years to wait around for complicated layers of permits. When speaking about our response to climate crises, Wade Crowfoot, California’s Secretary of Natural Resources succinctly put it,

"Winning slowly is still losing. We’re still losing if we’re winning in tiny bites. We need to be doing much bigger things faster. That’s how urgent the situation is." 

California and Maryland have taken steps in streamlining the permit process for projects that have ecological benefit in their states. These efforts are related; states across the country are realizing the urgency with which we need to restore our damaged and degraded lands, and how ridiculous it is that doing so is currently harder than creating a parking lot. Earlier this month the Biden-Harris Administration released their Permitting Action Plan, recognizing that the federal government plays a major role in permitting problems as well. With the influx of money heading towards infrastructure through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the administration realized that they needed to strengthen and accelerate Federal permitting and environmental reviews in order to spend this money in the law’s five year timeline. Revitalized and streamlined permitting pathways are on the horizon, and with it comes faster and larger restoration efforts. 

California

Over the last few years, California has been implementing the first iteration of the Cutting Green Tape Initiative. Designed to streamline permitting for restoration projects overseen by the state’s natural resource agencies in a few different ways, an update on progress was just released in March of this year. That, and conversations with restoration providers and regulators, have shown us that this initiative is doing a lot of good, but has aspects that still need to be worked out. 

A big win for this initiative has been improving the use of exemptions from CEQA, the state’s Environmental Quality Act. Projects have been moving faster through the pipeline, and stakeholders are communicating. There are still questions about CEQA exemption eligibility that will be continued to work out in future iterations. 

Our Restoration Economy Center recently hosted a webinar on Cutting Green Tape. We convened regulators, firm representatives, nonprofit partners, and policy experts to discuss what’s working, where it can be improved, and how other states–and federal agencies–can start streamlining their permitting processes. You can find a recording on our YouTube channel. 

Maryland

Taking a step in this direction, Maryland’s legislature passed the Conservation Finance Act (SB0348/HB0653) with overwhelming bipartisan support. The focus of the bill is on actions that improve water quality, but the changes will also advance environmental justice and public health, expand initiatives around forest and agricultural soil carbon sequestration, and reward projects that deliver co-benefits like local jobs, flood risk reduction, or climate resilience. 

A key piece of this legislation establishes a Green and Blue Infrastructure Policy Advisory Commission for 3 years, whose membership includes state agencies, local government, restoration businesses, conservation nonprofits, and others. The purpose of the Commission is to make recommendations on how to promote ecological restoration through green and blue infrastructure practices, including by looking at overlapping local, state, and federal requirements that may hinder climate resilience or ecological restoration projects. This committee will be looking for ways to accelerate the scale and pace of implementing green and blue infrastructure throughout the state, and identify changes to local development policies and regulations that facilitate timely permit review and approval of restoration projects. The recommendations resulting from this committee will likely include ways to streamline the permitting process, removing the overlapping requirements from various agencies. 

EPIC helped shepherd this bill; to learn more see our CFA Explainer. 

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EPIC has been tracking both of these initiatives for over a year. To read earlier posts about Cutting Green Tape and the CFA, read our previous blog post. 

The Restoration Economy Center, housed in the national nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), aims to increase the scale and speed of high-quality, equitable restoration outcomes through policy change. Email Grace grace@policyinnovation.org if interested in learning more.