A rare occurrence in a government paralyzed by partisan gridlock, Congress has actually passed a bipartisan, meaningful and impactful regulatory reform bill that recently was signed into law by President Obama. H.R. 22, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, (commonly known as the FAST Act) is a transportation funding bill that also streamlines the environmental permitting process that is required for states to advance major infrastructure projects.

The effort to simplify federal regulations has been in the works since 2010. Over the years, hundreds of energy and transportation infrastructure projects have been stalled due to the unreasonable length of permitting delays. Costing companies billions of dollars in investments. This bill brings greater efficiency, transparency and accountability to the federal permitting process.

Some of the most important changes made in the FAST Act include:

• Streamlines duplicative federal environmental permitting review process for infrastructure projects, including energy generation and transmission, by allowing state-level reviews to be used in place of the federal reviews as long as the state work is sufficient.
• Requires the court system to consider the negative impact on job creation if an injunction to stop a project is granted. (Injunctions are typically filed by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, etc.)

In addition to changes in permitting, the law also requires the Secretary of Energy to work with energy generators and electric transmission owners to develop a strategic reserve of emergency reliability equipment and plan for an event such as critical grid failure or security attack. This is important to the business community because as large energy consumers businesses need a constant supply of energy. Any failure to the power grid could mean economic disaster. Energy outages could result in loss of sensitive information in data centers or private companies. Our grid has been determined to be one of the biggest vulnerabilities in the scenario of a cyber, or electrical grid attack and this law will help combat this weakness.

This legislation is a huge win for the Ohio business community. It will bring better coordination and predictability to the permitting process which will translate into more job creation and economic development. This is the first type of any comprehensive changes made to the permitting process since the duplicative rules were mandated by the federal government in 1969.

Those members of the Ohio delegation voting in favor of the FAST Act are:

Reps:

Chabott, Beatty, Fudge, Gibbs, Johnson, Joyce, Kaptur, Latta, Ryan, Stivers,  Tiberi, Turner

Sens:

Brown, Portman