February 2010 Archives

Every single day, the Federal Register prints new rules, proposals, and interpretations of environmental and energy regulations that can affect your operations. If you operate in New York or the neighboring states, there are even more changes in the works, from the need to evaluate your carbon emissions to new RACT requirements. How can you keep track of it all?

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Your project is a puzzle, and the pieces not only have to fit, they have to fall into place at the right times. Often, the hardest piece of the puzzle is timing of permits -- and environmental permits can be the trickiest of all. With all the levels of government you have to deal with, it's easy to miss a requirement that can trip you up, causing costly delays.

Environmental approvals can seem like a maze -- wrong turns, dead ends, and no clear view of the finish. What can you do to keep your project moving through the environmental maze? Plenty.

• First, talk to your regulators, early and often. If you wait until you need your permits to start working on them, the bureaucrats aren't going to feel your pain.
• Second, make sure you know all the permits you need, who needs to issue them, and which part of your team is responsible for them. It's best to have one person on your team who keeps track of all the permits.
• Third, and most important: prepare to be flexible. Project sponsors often lose critical weeks or months arguing with regulators over what turn out to be relatively small points. Don't win the battle to lose the war.

No project is easy in New York, but with the right guidance, you can get the pieces to fit. Call Carl Johnson Consulting, LLC, for help in putting it all together.

New York State has long led the way on climate change regulation. From the early days of the Governor's Greenhouse Gas Task Force through the development of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, to the inclusion of important climate change considerations in the new State Energy Plan, New York has led the way. You may think that if you're not in the business of energy generation, it doesn't affect you. But controlling fossil fuel emissions from power plants is only the beginning. New York State already requires that projects examine energy use and greenhouse gas emissions as part of the SEQR process -- not only direct emissions, but also indirect emissions caused by your project may need to be evaluated. Depending on your project, you may need to be evaluating your direct energy use as well as the indirect effects of your project. Of course, what triggers significance is undefined -- like a lot of things in SEQR, the lead agency will know it when it sees it. Project sponsors heading into the SEQR process would be well-advised to look at those potential impacts, and be prepared to reduce or mitigate them, early in the process in order to avoid surprises.