From: Lexology
Marc T. Campopiano, Andrea M. Hogan and Joshua W. Marnitz | Latham & Watkins LLP
On September 22, 2015, the White House, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), issued guidance to the heads of certain federal departments and agencies[1] (the Agencies) establishing metrics for the permitting and environmental review of infrastructure projects in the United States (the Guidance). The Guidance is intended to expand the use and reframe the purpose of the publicly accessible online Federal Infrastructure Permitting Dashboard (the Dashboard). To that end, the Guidance establishes a set of metrics to track permit and review timelines for certain infrastructure projects, and sets a schedule for collecting and posting that data to the Dashboard. It then outlines an approach for capturing and reporting the environmental and community impacts resulting from the federal permitting and review process.
***
The Guidance also states that OMB and CEQ will aggregate the reported data to develop “timeliness indicators” for the federal permitting and review process for covered sectors. While OMB and CEQ do not plan to develop timeline targets for individual projects, beginning in mid-2016, OMB and CEQ, in consultation with the Agencies, plan to review the data to determine if there is a sufficient baseline to set aggregate targets and/or to identify what, if any, additional information is needed to do so.