Project and Environmental Review Advisory Committee -- Supplementary Report

SUPPLEMENTARY REPORT OF THE PROJECT REVIEW AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS ADVISORY COMMITTEE

I. INTRODUCTION

The Project Review and Environmental Analysis Advisory Committee met April 29th to review its issue papers in light of the preliminary reactions to those papers provided by members of the Commission at its April 21, 1998 meeting. The Advisory Committee reached agreement on four general principles that underlie its issue papers and that we particularly wish to commend to the Commission for its further review and discussion.

This paper briefly discusses these general principles, and attached to this paper are updated versions of two of the issue papers. As noted in its earlier report, Advisory Committee members are not necessarily in agreement upon the details of the proposals contained in the issue papers.

The four general principles are:

1. Consideration should be given to substantially changing or eliminating the threshold determination for both non-project and project actions.

2. The state should prepare model ordinances or otherwise play more of a role in helping to set standards for critical areas regulations.

3. New standards for the environmental review of non-project actions need be developed.

4. The integration and coordination of permit processes among state agencies and between the state and local government needs to be substantially improved. Pilot projects testing ways in which this can happen should be pursued.

II. RECOMMENDATIONS

A. Consideration Should Be Given to Substantially Changing or Eliminating the Threshold Determination for Both Non-project and Project Actions.

1. Non-project actions

The existing SEPA process for environmental review of non-project actions -- actions such as the enactment and amendment of comprehensive plans and development regulations -- is not always conducive to good environmental review; at times, the existing process can discourage or thwart good environmental review. This is because the only environmental document prepared for most legislative enactments is a SEPA checklist, and this checklist usually is prepared after the proposed legislation has been written. The county or city prepares and reviews the checklist to determine whether the adverse environmental impacts disclosed in it are "significant" within the meaning of SEPA, but there is no useful standard of "significance" that leads to predictable and consistent decision-making from one jurisdiction to the next, and counties and cities have an incentive not to find impacts "significant" because when they do they must prepare an expensive and time-consuming EIS. When impacts are determined not to be "significant" in the SEPA sense, no further environmental review beyond the checklist is performed, but even "non-significant" plans or regulations often have environmental consequences and entail environmental trade-offs that ought to be acknowledged and understood by the policy-makers considering their adoption and the citizens whose conduct will be regulated.

Many cities and counties issued Determinations of Nonsignificance before enacting their GMA-required plans and regulations. These negative threshold determinations may well have been appropriate under existing law, especially in jurisdictions that were simply amending their existing plans and regulations. The quality of the plans and regulations would have been improved, however, if some environmental review had accompanied the development, drafting, and enactment of these plans or regulations. SEPA should encourage environmental review that is tailored in scope to the potential impacts of the plan or regulation being enacted, and such environmental review should occur while the plan or regulation is being developed, not performed as an after-the-fact justification for decisions that already have been made.

2. Project Actions

The SEPA threshold determination process divides project actions into the few that require Environmental Impact Statements and the many that do not. The great majority of projects receive DNS’s or MDNS’s. The amount and quality of the environmental review that these projects receive varies from project to project and jurisdiction to jurisdiction because SEPA does not provide a meaningful standard for determining significance or a clear and consistent process for evaluating impacts that are not deemed significant. In addition, SEPA does not provide clear direction on the use a city or county should make of existing environmental documents that have been prepared for other projects or for non-project actions such as the adoption of a sub-area plan. The SEPA process ought to focus on whether the impacts of a project have been identified and studied to the extent appropriate given the nature and extent of those impacts. The present threshold determination process can distract from that determination and lead to confusion, duplication of effort, procedural gamesmanship, and unnecessary delay.

The issue paper entitled Proposed Revisions to the SEPA Process, drafted by Professor Richard Settle and Pat Schneider, proposes two ways in which the SEPA process could be changed to address these and related issues.

B. New Standards for the Environmental Review of Non-project Actions Need Be Developed.

The legislative decisions embodied in plans and regulations have environmental consequences, and entail environmental trade-offs, that ought to be identified and considered by the policy-makers who adopt such plans and regulations. Even when an EIS is prepared before the adoption of a plan or regulation, the current SEPA rules provide little guidance on the content of such a non-project EIS. The members of the committee agree that the quality of environmental review of non-project actions, including the analysis of alternatives, should be improved and made more consistent, so that legislative bodies and citizens alike understand the environmental trade-offs inherent in legislative choices and so that the environmental consequences of such choices do not need to be studied again at the project level.

Richard E. McCann has revised his issue paper regarding Environmental Analysis During Planning so that it now proposes an amendment to the SEPA rules instead of an amendment of the Growth Management Act, to illustrate how standards for such enhanced environmental review could be written. This revised paper is attached.

C. The State Should Prepare Model Ordinances or Otherwise Play More of a Role in Helping to Set Standards for Critical Areas Regulations.

There is considerable variation in the quality of critical areas ordinances from one jurisdiction to another. The members of the Advisory Committee agree that the state should play more of a role to play in helping to improve the consistency and quality of such ordinances. The issue paper prepared by Tracy Burrows and Chris Townsend and entitled Prerequisites for Streamlined Project Review proposes "state certification" of local critical areas regulations as well of the local docketing system and local citizen participation process. Not all members of our Advisory Committee agree that the appropriate role for the state is to "certify" local ordinances. The members of the Committee do agree that the state should do more to set standards. One way to accomplish this, and that received a favorable initial discussion by the Committee, is to have the state prepare one or more model ordinances that cities and counties could adopt, with or without modifications to suit local circumstances so long as they articulated the reasons for the modifications.

D. The Integration and Coordination of Permit Processes among State Agencies and Between the State and Local Governments Needs to Be Substantially Improved, and Pilot Projects Testing Ways in Which this Can Happen Should Be Pursued.

The members of the Advisory Committee agree on the need to improve both "horizontal" integration and coordination among state agencies, and "vertical" integration and coordination between state agencies and local governments. The attached Permit Consolidation Issue Paper by Wendy Bolender and Charles R. Wolfe has been updated to more specifically suggest ways in which such integration and coordination can be attempted on a pilot basis and otherwise pursued.