However, Kleeschulte reported that the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) had improved from taking 180 days on average to process a wetlands permit in 1981 to less than 60 days by 1985. Two months is still the target, forty years later. “We certainly strive to have them done in 45 to 60 days,” explains Heather Markway, chief of the South Branch of USACE-Alaska District’s Regulatory Division. “We definitely have better timelines than some other areas of the country, but it really depends on the complexity of the permit.”

Complexity, unfortunately, can stretch a two-month turnaround into twelve when USACE must consult with other agencies. “Back then, permits were so much easier,” Markway says. “If you look at old decision documents, they weren’t doing the same amount of consulting and coordination with other agencies that we do now.”

Robin Reich, president of Solstice Alaska Consulting, tells clients to expect longer timelines. “Often a client will come to me and say, ‘I want to build this project in two months.’ That’s just not going to happen,” says Reich. “You have to plan your projects understanding that it will take you six months to a year to get your permits.”

The battle to streamline permitting wasn’t won in 1985, and it is still being fought today.

Reich observes, “Streamlining has been jargon since the ‘80s. It’s been in everything, and I hear that word coming from industry a lot. I hear, ‘How can we streamline this process?’”

Kleeschulte heard the same in 1985. “For years, industry in Alaska has been complaining that it’s been buried in red tape,” he wrote. “But at last, industry officials say state government has acknowledged the need for change and is taking steps to cure the malady.”

“At last” didn’t last forever. The red tape giveth, the red tape taketh away.

“Now we have to get an IHA, which is an incidental harassment authorization” under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, says Jason Davis, president of marine construction company Turnagain. “For really every marine project that gets built in Alaska, prior to about 2018, those were almost non-existent.”

The IHA is triggered every time Turnagain builds in the water because of noise that might disturb wildlife. Of course, IHA isn’t a state requirement, and it doesn’t even come from USACE directly. Markway says, “We have to comply with Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, so we’ll consult with National Marine Fisheries Service or US Fish and Wildlife Service. We have to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act [of 1966], so we’ll consult with local tribes or anyone with a potential cultural impact.” Those are in addition to USACE’s chief concerns: Section 404 of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.

Another holdup is analysis and disclosure of impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. Not a permit approval per se, but Reich notes that compliance can take a long time. It’s required for most federally funded projects, and sometimes multiple agencies funding a single project require their own submissions.

Depends on the scope. “If you’ve got a really large pipeline project or a really large mine project, you know, versus Joe building a dock: those are different levels of analysis,” Markway says. “We’re definitely good at streamlined nationwide permits for docks and pilings. We’re definitely pretty quick to turn those out, especially if it’s something simple.”

When permitting gets complicated, even large contractors like Turnagain hire specialists to shepherd the process. Davis says an in-house project manager can track compliance, and civil engineers can handle building permits, but Solstice Alaska is better at environmental permits.

“We like working with them because they’re smaller and nimble but big enough that they have all the right expertise,” Davis says. “Someone from my engineering staff or my construction staff speaks with Robin every day. We have, I think, seven or eight or nine projects that she’s working on for us at different stages every month, so it’s a constant element of our business.”

With a nine-member team, Reich says Solstice Alaska works on projects large and small. “We have recently been doing a lot of marine-type permitting, but we also permit roads, water, sewer systems in rural Alaska, buildings, and other things around the state,” Reich says. She adds that her firm doesn’t do North Slope or mining projects, where other consultants serve the market.

Reich says she “wanted to be Jacques Cousteau” and studied biology before getting into the consulting business, blending science and construction. “You have to keep up with the most recent science,” she says. “There’s a lot of research that goes into determining impacts.”

The process typically begins with a detailed project description. Reich explains, “I need to understand how many piles are going in the water, how much fill is going in the water, how they plan to construct the project. I have to have a good understanding of the scope of work. And then we typically talk with the agencies; we have an agency meeting to introduce them to the project. Then we put together a project description which includes everything that’s happening and the potential impacts.”

To determine those impacts, her team has knowledge based on experience, but they also bring in outside experts. “If we need a wetland delineation done or if we need an archaeological survey done, we rely on subconsultants to do that work,” Reich says. “We don’t do science in house. We take science and turn it into permit applications.”

The firm also helps to move permits through agencies’ statutory requirements, like public notices.

A correctly formatted permit application is rarely at risk of being denied. Davis says, “The plus side to permitting in Alaska is it’s usually not a question of if a project can get built or if a permit will be issued. It really comes down to the time and the steps and the mitigation to make sure it’s done properly.”

Since 1985, one major permitting hurdle has been streamlined into nonexistence. Reich recalls, “When I first started my career, you had to do a coastal project questionnaire and go through that whole process. That’s not around anymore. So I guess it’s streamlining if it goes away.”

The Alaska Legislature voted against renewing Coastal Zone Management in 2011, the first eligible state to exit the program Congress established in 1972. Instead of the state leading permits in coastal waters, with an obligation to consider input from local communities, approvals are managed at the federal level.

Federal streamlining continues with USACE rolling out its Regulatory Request System (RRS) last year. Markway describes it as a dashboard, a “one-stop shop” with all relevant documentation attached, where applicants can track their permit status.

“They can see in real time what the project manager is putting in the database related to their project,” Markway says. “And you can use RRS to request a preapplication consultation; you don’t have to know all the information on your project right away, but if you would like to set up a meeting with us to talk it through, you can do that with the RRS.”

Another step toward efficiency, she notes, is a partnership with US Fish and Wildlife Service for additional lidar data of remote Alaska topography. Markway says the laser scanning adds areas that previously were not in USACE’s wetlands inventory map. “We’re hoping that will increase our ability to do some of these reviews at our desks that normally we aren’t able to do as well without getting out in the field,” Markway says. “Having the best desktop information is very important,” especially for working year-round, when off-season remote visits are tough.

USACE is also trying to routinize common permit requests. Markway says, “We’ve recently set up a programmatic [with National Marine Fisheries Service] for certain sized piledriving activity in certain areas, and that has streamlined our consultation with them. We do regional general permits; we set up those for like activities.” She adds that the next programmatic setup could be for aquaculture sites.

But there’s only so much streamlining an agency can do. Markway remarks that USACE doesn’t have enough personnel to dedicate to faster turnaround times. Reich has noticed, too, that sometimes agencies don’t have enough staff to guarantee a timeline.

Davis gives permitting authorities credit for what they can accomplish. “The agencies do a good job of being responsive. We have good relationships with them,” he says. “While we might not like what they tell us the timeline is going to be, we have good luck with them hitting the timeline they tell us that they will hit. I don’t want to vilify the agencies that are issuing the permits; I think that they work hard and they do a nice job.”

He does have suggestions for improvement, though. “Every project that we permit in the water is done as if it’s the first time work’s been done in the area,” Davis says. “It seems like we should be able to have some checklist or process to validate that information from previous studies is applicable.”

He gives the example of studying noise impacts on marine mammals at one site, only to do it again for the same population of animals for a site down the shoreline. “I’m not saying that those studies aren’t important, and I’m not saying that all projects should be able to reuse previous studies, but it seems almost like the agencies should be able to have a study that’s accepted for a region and the projects that are going to get built in that region should be able to use that database,” Davis says. “That would reduce work for the permitting agencies, and it would reduce our cost in replicating studies that are almost identical to previous studies.”

Davis adds that sometimes listing a new endangered species has repercussions that aren’t well understood, such as a proposed listing for sunflower sea stars. “Having a diver available to go and swim the job site every morning to look for a species is extremely expensive,” he says, further noting the irony that divers may not move species to safer areas, only observe them to account for how many are harmed by the permitted activity. “Doesn’t seem like that offers a lot of benefit to the species itself.”

Short of those changes, responsibility for streamlining shifts to applicants. Markway says, “Sometimes it takes a while for the applicant to get back to us with information, whether it’s gathering that information or going to other sources. It takes a while, and that can impact our timeline.”

With that in mind, Reich knows exactly how to streamline permits. “Number one: know what you want to do,” she says. “You can’t be changing your mind. I have found that clients who don’t understand the scope of work or haven’t decided what they want to do—it’s very hard for us to move forward.”

Reich’s second tip is to prioritize authorizations by lead time. “You want to apply first for your Corps permit, then start working on your Endangered Species Act consultations and your incidental harassment authorization requests, then work on local permits that take less time,” she says.

Her third tip, echoing Markway, is to answer requests quickly. “Agencies don’t have much staff, and they have too much workload,” Reich says. “So if you don’t answer the question quickly, it’s going to the bottom of the pile. They’re not going to twiddle their thumbs waiting for you to answer the question.”

Reich’s fourth recommendation is to keep open lines of communication with agencies. “Be talking with them often. They’re very open to having monthly meetings, I’ve found, or just talking to them on the phone. Plus, your project stays in front of them, so they’re thinking about it more,” she says.

All four tips put the onus on companies to streamline, whereas the focus of Kleeschulte’s 1985 article was improving government responsiveness. Before he joined the magazine’s masthead in its inaugural year, Kleeschulte was press secretary for then-Governor Jay Hammond, and by the time he retired in 2018 he was a top aide to Senator Lisa Murkowski. From his point of view, there were too many federal, state, and local permit and license requirements, “everything from deepening an oil well to processing milk to filling in wetlands to operating a gas pump,” Kleeschulte wrote.

Kleeschulte added, “Industries largely accept the need for government regulation to protect the health and safety of residents and the environment of the Last Frontier. But they don’t like the complexity of the regulatory process or what they perceive to be a tendency on the part of some agencies to add unrealistic requirements to project approvals and to procrastinate on making decisions.”

If those permits went away, Reich says Solstice Alaska would stay busy with other consulting jobs, such as community planning and grant writing. But permit approvals are likely to remain part of her business.

“We just don’t say that permits are going to go away because [for that to happen] we’d have to say, okay, the Clean Water Act is going to go away; the Rivers and Harbors Act is going to go away; the Marine Mammal Protection Act is going to go away; the Endangered Species Act is going to go away; the National Historic Preservation Act is going to go away; the Magnuson-Stevens [Fishery Conservation and Management] Act is going to go away. There are so many of those different environmental laws that would [need to] go away,” Reich says.

While those laws remain, streamlining permits is a perpetual goal. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t want to streamline as much as possible,” Markway says. “As long as we’re thorough and we’re following all of our regulations… then there’s no reason why we wouldn’t want to strive for being as streamlined as possible.”