CRWA in the News

Op-Ed: Push to protect and permit

By Bob Zimmerman, Executive Director of Charles River Watershed Association

Boston Globe, Wednesday, February 17, 2007

With the governor's appointment of a regulatory permitting ombudsman, opportunities abound for getting it right with development permitting. Currently, major projects need two years, and sometimes longer, to wend their way through local and state permitting processes.

There are a number of ways an ombudsman could help, but in the age of global climate change and water resource depletion, it is critical that he not take the conventional approach of slashing environmental protection in the name of permit streamlining. In fact, if controlling and reversing the damage done to the planet and the Commonwealth is the aim , the governor, his environmental secretary, and the ombudsman should revisit and strengthen environmental regulation.

Strengthened regulation, however, need not make development permitting more onerous. Done well, it could achieve the dual results of speeding up the permitting process and providing for a better environment.

First, while the Massachusetts budget doubled during the 1990s, the state Department of Environmental Protections was level funded. In the years since, the department budget has been cut by nearly 40 percent. DEP deserves significant additional funding from the Patrick administration and the Legislature, regardless of deficit projections, to restore personnel so that it can write and review permits in a timely manner.

Second, an incentive-based environmental certification program similar to that created by Jim Hunt at the Boston Environment Department should be vigorously pursued. Clear, certifiable guidelines detailing environmentally sensitive site design, energy and conservation reductions, building material use, and water and wastewater infrastructure requirements need to be developed and adopted statewide.

Those projects that can certify they have met all the standards should be rewarded with a foreshortened permitting process. Those that have not should be sent back to the drawing board, or at least require closer review and conditioning.

With a foreshortened process based on enhanced environmental design, capital investment budgets would at least balance against traditional permitting and construction by saving permitting money, time, and operation costs for energy and site maintenance for the new projects when constructed.

There are a number of certification programs that could be used for models, but all tend to focus on the building itself, and fail to consider site characteristics, transportation and open space issues, and methods of resolving existing environmental problems by getting developers to think about the effects beyond their sites. All of these things can be built into a certification process. It will be critical, of course, to ensure that public notification and comment are not lost, but certification programs are extremely promising in providing the kinds of incentives that would promote far greater environmental sensitivity than the current array of seldom coordinated individual permits.

Third, state and local building codes need to be revisited for their environmental effects. Writing those codes not only to promote safety, but to promote efficiency in energy and water use makes good sense. Codes coordinated with environmental certification and permitting processes would also enhance streamlining and help protect and restore the environment.

Finally, the elephant in this environmental streamlining room is zoning law in Massachusetts. It is archaic, piecemeal, and in many instances, plays to the fears of homeowners regarding growth and change. It promotes large lot residential development as a way of controlling growth, which, ironically, destroys forests, farms, and open spaces. Piecemeal efforts to amend and improve the law have met with only limited success. If the governor is really going to streamline permitting while protecting the environment, his administration must take on Massachusetts zoning law. Zoning must be rewritten to promote density zones, transportation-oriented development, cluster and open space housing, and reduced requirements for street-width and strip parking, and multiple use districts.

The governor appreciates the need to address the loss of major corporations and industries in Massachusetts, as well as the high cost of housing. The two are intimately linked. And he has identified the permitting processes in the state as a culprit.

But to solve the development, housing, and serious environmental problems , he is going to need to take a different approach to permit streamlining, one which provides incentives for getting the environmental part right, rather than dispensing with those regulations as obstacles to economic growth.