The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register January 10 titled Update to the Regulations Implementing the Procedural Provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The update is intended to speed up and simplify the review of environmental impact statements under NEPA, which CEQ states take an average of four and a half years to complete and ordinarily are more than 600 pages. The proposal stems from Executive Order 13807, which established a One Federal Decision policy in 2017 directing CEQ to consider revisions to update its regulations.
AMWA and the American Water Works Association submitted a 30-day extension request January 27 due to the “scope of the rule, the breadth of the proposed changes, and the level of detail that is necessary for thoughtful responses."