Army Corps of Engineers announces the release of revised handbook to improve interagency coordination of transportation projects

Published Sept. 21, 2015

WASHINGTON (September 21, 2015) – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in collaboration with a federal interagency team announced today the release of a revised handbook that will help agencies coordinate earlier and more effectively during the development of transportation and other infrastructure projects and throughout the permit review process.

The handbook entitled, Synchronizing Environmental Reviews for Transportation and Other Infrastructure Projects, also known as the Red Book, is available online at the USACE Publications web page, and at the Federal Highway Administration’s Environmental Review Toolkit at https://www.environment.fhwa.dot.gov/strmlng/RedBook_2015.asp.  This new Red Book does not contain any new policy or guidance, but rather describes how agencies can flexibly apply existing regulations, guidance and policy in order to maximize efficiency by having agency reviews run concurrently. The new Red Book replaces an earlier edition of the book published in 1988.

An Obama administration memorandum from May 2013 and an implementation plan on modernizing infrastructure permitting issued in 2014, called for the 1988 edition of the Red Book to be updated. The revised book promotes concurrent reviews, but also includes the use of dedicated transportation and infrastructure liaisons, development of programmatic approaches, and use of a watershed-scale approach to mitigation, since these practices align with other actions in the administration’s implementation plan.

 An interagency federal team including representatives from the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Railroad Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and USACE was formed in 2014 to begin updating the existing Red Book. In preparing the new book, the team expanded the book’s scope to cover other modes of transportation (railroad, transit, and highway) and focused on several regulatory reviews including USACE’s regulatory review, Coast Guard’s bridge permit reviews under Title 33 of the U.S. Code, and Section 7 consultation under the Endangered Species Act.

The goal of the Red Book is to encourage more widespread adoption of the concurrent review practice among all the agencies involved in developing and permitting transportation and infrastructure projects.