Expediting Project Delivery Through In-House Environmental Program

About the Program

Category: Arts, Culture and Historic Preservation (Best in Category)

Year: 2014

The Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) has validated the increasingly popular view that instituting an internal Environmental Program within county government can significantly contribute toward ensuring that the requirements and intent of environmental and historic preservation law is fulfilled throughout the planning, design and construction of transportation projects. At MCDOT, our proactive approach exceeds standard compliance practice via a re-invigorated Environmental Program Branch. Our internal process improvement effort (initiated October 2011) was predicated on not only compliance, but a synthesized integration of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) with the National Historic Preservation Act-Section 106 (NHPA). In this manner historic preservation regulatory compliance is placed within an appropriate context wherein preservation issues can be quickly identified and treated relevant to their scale and significance to overall environmental compliance and project advancement. In tandem with the project development scheme and environmental analysis, MCDOT can advance future efforts through environmental compliance beginning with project scoping, through sequential project design, and actual execution of all required mitigation measures prior to and during construction. The attendant demands of historic preservation compliance that entails public involvement, multijurisdictional consultation and responsiveness to regulator’s demands are embodied in this environmental process model.