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Sullivan: Permitting a focus for DNR Making permitting more efficient, timely and certain a building block in accelerating development in state; process under review Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
What does the state’s permitting process look like for an exploration well in Cook Inlet? Traced out on large pieces of poster board in a Department of Natural Resources conference room in Anchorage, the existing process is clearly complex.
Permitting is an issue for Alaska development, DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan said in a May 20 press briefing where the poster boards were displayed, and the department is working on identifying “what the challenges are — kind of a baseline of what the issue is.”
Permitting became a big issue in the last legislative session, he said, when DNR discussed the backlog of permits in its Division of Mining, Land and Water: about 2,500 permits.
That resulted in $2.7 million in incremental funding to the division to deal with the backlog. Wyn Menefee, DML&W chief of operations and the division’s acting director, said the money would allow the division to fill many vacant positions that were unfunded and also add six new positions.
Sullivan said the goal is to get that backlog taken care of in the next three years.
System as a whole Sullivan said a task force headed by DNR Deputy Commissioner Ed Fogels is looking at the permitting system as a whole, not just from DNR’s perspective, to see if the permits, regulations and statutory requirements “continue to make sense” and if there are ways to gain efficiency.
Sullivan said the task force has met several times and is “looking at ways in which to make our system more efficient, bring more certainty to it and more timeliness with regard to the permitting process.”
The goal for the task force is to have it make recommendations to the governor’s office and eventually to the Legislature, he said.
There are three categories of issues, Sullivan said.
The first is DNR regulations, which the department has the authority to look at and revise.
The second is regulations “closely tied to a statutory mandate” where the department must be careful not to undertake a regulatory change that has a statutory basis, and Sullivan said DNR would be coordinating with the Department of Law.
The third category is “just pure statutory requirements,” and there coordination would be with the governor’s office and then eventually the administration would go to the Legislature with recommendations of any statutory changes.
While the charts showing permitting complexity weren’t ready for the last legislative session, Sullivan said “we talked about this with a number of legislators” and there was general recognition that permitting is a challenge for the state.
He said that if DNR comes back with a package of recommendations, “certainly there will be a lot of interest and I think we’ll start in a constructive way because we had a very constructive dialogue about these issues during the last session down in Juneau.”
Federal liaison? Asked if there was room for a federal liaison, Fogels said the task force is just “getting staged right now.” He said there have been a couple of meetings, but it’s internal to DNR “just to get our own internal house sort of in order and evaluated.”
Fogels said DNR will then be reaching out to some other state permitting agencies such as the departments of Fish and Game and Environmental Conservation and will also pull in the Department of Law.
It will be fairly similar to one of DNR’s standard large permitting teams, he said: “We’ll get some of the best and the brightest people from the agencies that have been working on permitting issues for years.”
Establishing the state team is an initial step, Fogels said, because for permitting large projects, “quite frankly some of the biggest issues that we’ve faced permitting are federal issues.”
He said the state would be pulling in some federal permitting people at some point “because the federal permitting process is really key to making this whole thing work better.”
That will be the trickiest area to make progress, Fogels said, adding that he’s already trying to get a bit of an inroad into the president’s permitting team, announced earlier in May.
Fogels said the state would love to see the feds coordinate permits the way the state does, “because we don’t have the authority to coordinate for the feds, they have to do it voluntarily.”
EPA concerns Fogels said a federal issue of concern right now is a new guidance document the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing about how to determine whether a wetland is under federal jurisdiction.
“If that guidance goes forward, then significantly more wetlands will be under federal jurisdiction,” he said.
Fogels was participating by phone from Washington, D.C., and told Sullivan that federal officials were receptive to Alaska having a voice on the federal permitting group, but said it was too early to tell whether they could pull states in.
But there was interest in Alaska’s strong permit coordination process, Fogels said, and he was asked for follow-up information on the state’s coordination process.
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