Complex Project Permitting

Overview

Beveridge & Diamond, P.C. has extensive experience in taking large, complex projects through a multi-jurisdictional permitting review process. These projects often involve municipal, county, state and federal approvals as well as environmental assessments and impact statements. These projects can involve new manufacturing facilities, refineries, electric generating facilities, commercial offices, large residential buildings, laboratory complexes, waterfront developments and mixed use developments. The projects may involve brownfield or greenfield sites, or require major infrastructure improvements or rehabilitation. Typically, these projects implicate complicated assessments of environmental impacts or mitigation measures. Finally, these projects could involve substantial expansion of existing facilities with the need for new infrastructure and transportation access.

Full Description

Complex projects usually require in-depth consideration of environmental and other impacts. Impact statements for these projects typically encompass areas such as land use and zoning, visual and aesthetic resources, socioeconomics, environmental justice, air resources, traffic and transportation, cultural resources, noise, geology, soils, terrestrial ecology, infrastructure, cumulative impacts, water resources and construction impacts. Beveridge & Diamond has played a key role in advising clients and their consultants regarding the scope of the analyses required for each area and ensuring that the studies conducted for the project are consistent with information developed to support key permit applications.

Throughout the permitting process, Beveridge & Diamond takes a lead in interfacing between the client and its consultants to ensure that the necessary studies are completed in a timely fashion. One of the Firm’s critical responsibilities for complex projects is to ensure that legal and consulting costs are controlled without jeopardizing the project’s ability to obtain necessary approvals to proceed with development.

Whether review proceeds under NEPA, or a state equivalent, one area of particular concern for complex projects is an analysis of alternatives to the proposal under consideration. In advising clients, Beveridge & Diamond seeks to ensure the alternatives analysis is sufficient without creating a record that leaves project vulnerable to attack by opponents. For example, for several electric generating facility proposals in New York, Beveridge & Diamond successfully resisted calls by interveners to study alternative sites for the proposal, thereby avoiding the time and expense of such an undertaking.

For a number of projects, clients retain Beveridge & Diamond’s services through the development phase to ensure that the project complies with construction-related permit conditions. This can be particularly important where a brownfield redevelopment or critical environmental resource is involved.

Noteworthy

Examples of these types of projects that Beveridge & Diamond has successfully guided through the complex permitting and review process include:

a major oil tanker off-loading facility in a large East Coast port. Project reviews involved extensive coastal development issues both on the local and state level as well as the purchase of state riparian rights;

municipal, state and federal permits and authorizations for a major commercial office project on the Long Island sound in Connecticut. The project involved resolving state and federal inland and tidal wetlands issues, revising the existing municipal coastal area development code, as well as the sale of several hundred acres of valuable tidal wetlands to the federal government;

large electric generating facility projects in New York and New Jersey. Each project had to be shepherded through a comprehensive permitting and impact review process in a cost efficient manner. This often required critical up-front interaction with jurisdictional agencies to reasonably limit the scope of studies and analyses to be undertaken;

a major regional shopping center which involved extensive environmental impact statements as well as the dedication of property for endangered species protection;

a large residential/mixed use development on a brownfield site in New York City. This project, currently under construction, was approved for participation under New York’s brownfield program placing it in a position to recoup substantial remediation and development tax credits. The project had to be navigated through negotiations with the responsible party, as well the state agency responsible for the program;

construction of a large cogeneration facility in one state and the permitting of a private transmission line to a utility in another state. Beveridge & Diamond was responsible for the environmental permitting, municipal land use, acquisition of right-of-way and public utility issues.