Applying the NEPA Process for Department of Transportation Specialists


Description

Participants develop an understanding of NEPA and transportation decisionmaking, and skills to document decisions and their rationale. They learn to identify the appropriate form of environmental documentation and the appropriate level of detail. Through practice they learn to organize and write well-designed, consistent, and analytic EISs/EAs that clearly and concisely present managerial information to decisionmakers and the interested public.

Objectives

Upon completion of this workshop, participants will be able to do the following:

  • Understand integrated, shared decisionmaking as a context for environmental documentation
  • Produce, direct, contribute to, or review environmental decision documents that illuminate the decisionmaking thought process and serve as a management tool
  • Help decisionmakers make an informed, reasoned, legally defensible decision and help the interested and affected public respond effectively
  • Understanding the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 
    Learn why NEPA was created, its purpose, and the relationship between NEPA, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and other environmental laws.
  • Integrating the Proposal and NEPA Decisions
    Learn to identify and keep the decisionmaker informed. Create and analyze Records Of Decision (RODs) and Findings Of No Significant Impact (FONSIs).
  • Describing the Affected Environment
    Learn how to establish a baseline, describe environmental attributes and potential effects, and construct an effects prediction framework.
  • Developing Alternatives
    Learn to define the no-build alternative; establish the design, evaluation, and selection criteria; identify problem-causing actions of the alternatives; and discard alternatives that are unreasonable.
  • Predicting and Documenting Environmental Consequences
    Learn how to comply with CEQ requirements for documenting the prediction of effects, involve the public in the effects-analysis process, and comply with required Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Environmental Assessment (EA) documentional quality and characteristcs.

Audience

Participants for this training generally include NEPA coordinators, resource specialists, district engineers and other DOT professionals who must understand the NEPA process and how it applies to transportation projects.

Process

Transportation NEPA for Department of Transportation Specialists is an interactive workshop designed to build practical skills. For optimum learning, class size is limited to 15-25 participants.This 3- or 4-day workshop consists of a carefully designed combination of the following:

  • 25% Lecture
  • 75% Discussion and exercises

Materials

Participants receive the following:

  • Comprehensive workshop manual
  • Workshop Resources workbook