Infra Insight Blog

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other environmental laws can create significant legal risks for the delivery of complex infrastructure projects using alternative procurement strategies. On October 10, 2024, I had the pleasure of collaborating with my Nossaman colleague Rob Thornton, along with guest speaker Tim Suydam from the East County Advanced Water Joint Powers Authority, to discuss … 

During the Use of WIFIA breakout session at the NCPPP P3 Connect conference this week in Denver, Elizabeth Corr, Associate Division Director for the EPA, confirmed that the agency will not need to complete the formal federal rulemaking process to implement the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act.  The Act, or WIFIA, was recently enacted by Congress to make low cost loans and loan guarantees available to public and private sponsors of water projects and is based on the highly successful TIFIA program for transportation projects.  Ms. Corr mentioned that EPA conducted its ...

More evidence of the beneficial impacts of transit-oriented development has arrived in the form of a new property values study by the American Public Transportation Association, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the National Association of Realtors.  

(See also our blog post regarding the EPA report released last month promoting funding mechanisms and other strategies for communities to provide more transit-oriented development.)  

The study found that homes closer to public transit performed 42 percent better (in terms of resilience of property values)  than those ...

In a proposed rule to be published today, April 1, 2013, in the Federal Register, the United States Environmental Protection Agency will withdraw the numeric effluent limits for construction stormwater turbidity that the agency previously had proposed in 2009.  EPA is now proposing a rule that specifies minimum Best Management Practices (BMPs) as effluent limitations for purposes of controlling  pollutants in construction site stormwater runoff.  In general,  the rule concludes that BMP-based effluent limits constitute both a technically feasible and a cost effective way to ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a report that details funding mechanisms and development strategies that communities can use to provide innovative financing options for transit-oriented development (TOD). 

The report affirms the need for local and state transportation agencies to continue to think beyond traditional funding, procurement and contracting approaches to satisfy their burgeoning infrastructure needs. 

Detailed in the report is an explanation of innovative financing mechanisms, which should be required reading for those interested ...