Applying value engineering and modern assessment tools in managing NEPA: Improving effectiveness of the NEPA scoping and planning process

摘要

While the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing regulations focus on describing 'what' must be done, they provide surprisingly little direction on 'how' such requirements are to be implemented. Specific implementation of these requirements has largely been left to the discretion of individual agencies. More than a quarter of a century after NEPA's enactment, few rigorous tools, techniques, or methodologies have been developed or widely adopted for implementing the regulatory requirements. In preparing an Environmental Impact Statement, agencies are required to conduct a public scoping process to determine the range of actions, alternatives, and impacts that will be investigated. Determining the proper scope of analysis is an element essential to the successful planning and implementation of future agency actionns. Lack of rigorous tools and methodologies can lead to project delays, cost escalating, and increased risk that the scoping process may not adequately capture the scope of decisions that eventually might need to be considered. Recently, selected Value Engineering (VE) techniques were successfully used in managing a prescoping effort. A new strategy is advanced for conducting a pre-scoping/scoping effort that combines NEPA with VE. Consisting of five distinct phases, this approach has potentially wide-spread implications in the way NEPA, and scoping in particular, is practiced.