Historic site rule may slow some stimulus projects

Written by jrood

February 14, 2001 A routine federal requirement that's intended to preserve historic sites threatens to delay some economic stimulus projects around the country, McClatchy Newspapers report. Federally-funded projects that could affect sites with historic value are required to undergo reviews that consider ways to minimize disturbance of the sites. Projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are no different. In some cases, that's meant delays in getting crucial stimulus projects out the door, and therefore in pumping stimulus dollars into the economy.

So far, there’ve been
only scattered delays, but the state and tribal offices that conduct the reviews
say they’re concerned they won’t have enough resources to keep pace with all
the reviews that will be needed in the next round of projects.

In Pennsylvania, for
example, Amtrak had planned a $30-million stimulus-funded project to replace 24
miles of electric transmission lines along an abandoned rail route. Although
the trains are long gone, the transmission lines are still in use. The project
was projected to create 250 full-time equivalent positions, and the stimulus
dollars must be spent by February 2011. Nationwide, Amtrak was awarded $1.3
billion for a total of 205 capital improvement projects.

Before ground can be
broken, however, the project must undergo a historical review, which involves
consultation with counties, townships and Indian tribes along the old railroad
route, as well as the state historic preservation office. That began last
September, and the project still hasn’t received final approval.

Susan Zacher, a
supervisor with Pennsylvania’s historic preservation office, said in June that
she expected an agreement to be signed soon that would lay out the measures
Amtrak would take to preserve the railway’s history. Mostly, that means
building kiosks with historical information along the route. In the meantime,
construction hasn’t begun, and the stimulus funding for the project has been
downsized to $1.5 million, Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm said.

Historic review
frequently has been time-consuming. What’s different now is that state and
tribal reviewers say the influx of stimulus-funded projects is increasing their
workload while the budgets to carry out that work are flat or declining.

In March 2009, the
National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers told Congress that
at least 13 state historic preservation offices had undergone staffing cuts and
30 were in the midst of hiring freezes. As for tribal historic preservation
offices, the average federal dollars allocated to each tribe have decreased in
the past year as new tribal preservation offices have been instituted, according
to the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers.

While the White House and
Congress were hammering out the stimulus bill last year, advocacy groups pushed
for $50 million to assist historic preservation offices. It didn’t make it into
the final legislation, however.

In a Government
Accountability Office report in February, officials at the Departments of
Commerce and Transportation said the historic review process had affected the
selection and timing of projects. Out of the 16 states surveyed, one –
California – told the GAO that historic reviews already had caused delays in
getting projects out the door, and six other states said the reviews might
cause delays.

In California, furloughs
in the state historic preservation office led to months-long backlogs in
hundreds of stimulus projects, from the construction of clinics to highway
projects. After the state inspector general for stimulus projects highlighted
the issue, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office put more people in the state historic
preservation office and the backlogs disappeared, said Roy Stearns, a spokesman
for the California State Parks, which runs the preservation office.

Iowa, Michigan,
Mississippi, New Jersey, New York state and Texas told the GAO that historic
review requirements could slow their stimulus projects. In more recent
interviews, however, these states said they’d found ways to avoid delays,
either by streamlining the historic review or – in the case of New York – by
choosing not to use recovery act money for certain types of projects.

Robert Cast supervises a
three-person office that reviews every project that might affect burial sites
or artifacts from the Caddo Nation, a Native American tribe of about 5,000 headquartered
in Oklahoma but with historic lands that span four states. Cast said it had
been hard to keep up with the increasing number of calls and e-mails that were
coming into his office since the stimulus bill passed last year. He’s
particularly concerned about a broadband project to lay fiber optic cable
across swaths of rural Oklahoma that could affect multiple historic tribal
sites.

Jessica Schafer, a
spokeswoman for the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and
Information Administration, said the agency was working to ensure that reviews
of its stimulus-funded broadband initiatives proceeded in a timely fashion.

However, Adrian Fine, the
state and local policy director for the National Trust for Historic
Preservation, said it was possible that things might get more complicated, not
less. Fine said that while many early stimulus projects already had gone
through historic review, those in a second wave of stimulus money hadn’t yet.

"It’s becoming more
and more of a challenge in getting the reviews through in an expedited
fashion," he said.

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