Public input process is broken on federal permitting

The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) needs to be improved, but not the way the Trump administration is suggesting. One of the most problematic areas is the public input process. It often seems like agencies are going through the motions. Comments are responded to briefly (if at all) and are summarized in a way that makes it easy to tally numbers and hard to hear the voices of the people.

In preparing to write this, I looked up the NEPA text that set up the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process. NEPA states that, “Congress recognizes that each person should enjoy a healthful environment and that each person has a responsibility to contribute to the preservation and enhancement of the environment.” Regulations for the EIS process say, “Federal agencies shall to the fullest extent possible: ... (d) Encourage and facilitate public involvement in decisions which affect the quality of the human environment.”

What we see happening now in the public input process is so different from NEPA’s goals. Responding to pressure from the top to speed things up, the public input process is becoming ever more of a token effort. Federal agencies now tell the public that they only want to receive “substantive” factual corrections, additions, or description of omissions. They don’t want to hear people’s opinions.

When the public input process works correctly, decision makers, including those proposing a project, respond to the concerns of both professionals and the impacted public. This was the case with the recent Willow Project near Nuiqsut. ConocoPhillips dropped its plan to build an artificial island near the Colville River Delta in response to local residents, who explained that the island would likely interfere with their traditional hunting of marine mammals. It has also been the case in the past for other North Slope oil projects, where dedicated agency staff made sure that best practices were used and that mistakes from the early days were not repeated.

However, the general public is being intimidated from contributing. In most cases (with some recent exceptions), the science included in an EIS is accurate and thorough. The documents are often more than 1,000 pages, with lots of tables, figures and references. How is the general public supposed to digest reams of scientific studies and provide “substantive” comments? Yet their voices are the most important, and their inclusion is mandated by NEPA. Input from Alaskans on how they view these development projects, based on their values, their relationship with the environment and their experience as residents of the area are exactly what decision-makers in Washington, D.C., need to know. The science cannot make a decision on any of these projects. It can only provide data. People and their values are what make the decision. And if the public’s values are not included as part of the EIS, then the government does not have the necessary information on which to base a decision.

An especially poor example of the public input process was the meeting held in Fairbanks on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leasing. At this meeting, no public comments were accepted, except those spoken individually to a sitting court recorder. It was an arrogant approach by the Bureau of Land Management, assuming its role was to educate the public on the science. People came from a long way, from remote villages, spending their money and time to try to get their voices heard in this impersonal process. They wanted to talk to the decision makers, to tell them of their life experiences on the land, and to try to influence the final decision. In the end, they were allowed to speak publicly, but only because they insisted. This meeting was presided over by a somewhat bored-looking Joe Balash. He was head of BLM at the time but quit soon after, joining a foreign oil company linked to a different company that recently leased almost a million acres of BLM land in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Martha Raynolds is an Arctic plant ecologist who lives in Fairbanks.

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