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BOARDMAN — Political party notwithstanding, or whether a person lives on the East Coast, on the West Coast or in the Midwest, its pretty much undisputed “that we need to build things,” said Bill Koetzle with Building a Better America.
“We need to build airports, we need to build roads, we need to build bridges, we need to build pipelines … but right now, all of these projects are really hampered by outdated, inefficient and often an inconclusive permitting process because no matter what you want to build or where you want to build it, this permitting process has really become a significant barrier to making progress,” Koetzle said.
He is the leader of the organization that has undertaken the effort for permit reform, or to speed federal approvals for technical and environmental permits for infrastructure, manufacturing and energy-related projects.
He also led a roundtable discussion on ways to reform the system last week at the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 396 union hall in Boardman.
Also on the panel were Congressman Bill Johnson, R-Marietta; Marty Loney, Local 396 business agent and president, Western Reserve Building Trades; Guy Coviello, president / CEO, Youngstown / Warren Regional Chamber; and Jackie Stewart, director of external affairs, Encino Energy.
LONG AND COMPLEX
Often, the permit process is “the longest part of a project and in today’s environment, the most complicated part,” Johnson said.
He said work he and other members of the House’s energy and commerce committee are doing this session “is right in the bulls eye of this permitting issue.”
On average, it takes about 4.5 years from application to approval, according to Koetzle.
The work being done by the committee includes cutting red tape in Washington, D.C., to unlock access to raw materials, quickly returning critical supply line and jobs to the U.S. and advancing America’s energy dominance, thus reducing reliance on China and other foreign adversaries, Johnson said.
“If we don’t break the logjam in this permitting process, we’re going to continue to fall behind and we’re going to continue to fall victim to nations like China,” which doesn’t have a permitting process, but “they just do,” Johnson said.
“We’ve got to figure out how to do while being responsible about it, and we can do that. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, we’ve just got to get back to believing we can do that,” he said.
Among the reforms sought by Building A Better America are limiting timelines for environmental reviews, streamlining the process for such reviews across agencies and ensuring a final decision is final.
LOCAL LEVEL
The chamber’s Coviello said permitting issues also affect small- to medium-sized companies at the local level.
“A lot of people think about the big shiny factories and how they are going to be built, and how the permitting process might bog them down, but let’s not forget there remains small, even family-owned manufacturing operations that are simply trying to expand,” Coviello said. “And that permitting process can be very costly for them, change their whole makeup of their ability to grow the local economy.”
Encino Energy, based in Houston, is one of the largest private oil and gas producers in the U.S.
The company operates in the Utica Shale in Ohio; it’s the largest oil producer and second largest natural gas producer in the state.
For the company to grow, she said bipartisan leadership is needed in Washington, D.C., and there needs to a comprehensive energy policy at the federal and state levels.
“When we think about permitting reform, whether on the natural gas or oil side, we are talking about the ability to literally not only continue to create hundreds of thousands of jobs our industry has created here in Ohio because we’ve invested over $100 million into the state,” Stewart said.
Loney said permitting reform is a bipartisan issue — not Republican and not Democrat — and one, in essence, is “about putting people to work.”
The 4.5 years on average to get a permit OK is nearly as long as an apprenticeship, leaving apprentices to wait “their entire five years of their apprenticeship program before they can even get out there” to work.
The length of time also could impact investors in a project, which also could be impacted by inflation or interest rates and other factors, he said. It also keeps people from working in the local economy.
“This is something that is sorely needed,” Loney said. “To be clear, this doesn’t mean that permitting reform weakens the standards. It shouldn’t weaken the standards, it should make it better.”
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