Source: http://crmplus.blogspot.com/2013_07_01_archive.html
Timestamp: 2017-02-21 07:42:12
Document Index: 647470522

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 800', '§ 800', '§ 800', '§ 800', '§ 800', '§1501', 'art 2', 'art 800']

As you know, yesterday I accepted Governor Christineger’s
appointment as East Utalina’s State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO). I am honored and humbled by this appointment,
and look forward to working with all of you.
In accepting the Governor’s appointment, I also accepted –
and strongly support – his direction to make a 25% cut in the cost of SHPO
operations and to simplify administrative processes. The major purpose of this memorandum is to
explain how I intend to implement this direction.
By way of background, I believe strongly that the central
purpose of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the East Utalina
Historic Resources Act (EUHRA) is to protect and advance the public interest
with respect to historic preservation. NHPA and EUHRA were not intended to place the
interests of historic preservation above all other interests, and the office of
SHPO, created and described in the statutes, is not intended to be an unfailing
advocate for historic preservation regardless of other interests. Nor, I believe, is it the purpose of the SHPO
to serve largely as an information repository, a collector of information, or a
The core responsibility of the SHPO, I believe, is to do
whatever is feasible to ensure that the public has every opportunity to
influence decision-making relating to the management of historic properties,
including the management of impacts on such properties. This is implicit in the language of the regulations
implementing Section 106 of NHPA, wherein the SHPO is said to “reflect the
interests of the State and its citizens in the preservation of their cultural heritage”
(36 CFR § 800.2(c)(1)(i)). No individual
or office can in fact reflect such a range of interests as those represented by
the State and all its citizens, so what we must do is to ensure that citizens
can readily participate in what we do, and to influence our decisions and those
of others. In many ways, NHPA and EUHRA
are intended to protect the interests of the public from the plans and projects
of government and those it assists or licenses. This is the function I intend to emphasize.
Much of our staff time – and hence our budget – is given
over to (a) encouraging, receiving, reviewing and processing nominations to the
National and State Registers of Historic Places (carried out by the Office of
Registration) and (b) participation in federal project review under Section 106
of NHPA and Section 601 of EUHRA (carried
out by the Office of Consultation). The
following measures are designed to simplify these functions, substantially
achieving the 25% cost reduction ordered by the Governor while improving our
responsiveness to the public interest.
1. Effective immediately, the Office of
Registration is abolished. Registration,
including listing properties on the State and National Registers, is a
recordkeeping function that we must downgrade.
a. To the extent registration continues, it will be
carried out by the Office Librarian.
b. SHPO sponsorship of surveys and nominations to
the State and National Registers will be wound down in an orderly manner; by
the end of this fiscal year, investment in such operations should approximate
c. Nominations prepared by others will be received
and reviewed as time permits, with priority given to properties whose
registration relates in some demonstrable way to land-use planning, development
project review, and/or the receipt of grants to support preservation, with the
explicit recognition that neither NHPA nor EUHRA require placement on the
National or State Register to trigger the review of impacts on properties;
eligibility for either register is sufficient.
d. Employees whose positions are terminated by this
action will receive priority consideration for jobs that become available
elsewhere in the office, and will be counseled regarding employment options in
other state agencies, local governments, with Indian tribes, and in the private
2. The Chief, Office of Consultation will within
thirty (30) days deliver to me a plan of action to achieve the following
a. Finalize guidelines for all federal and state
agencies regarding initiation of NHPA Section 106 review in accordance with 36
CFR § 800.3, and for the conduct of review under 36 CFR §§ 800.4 and 800.5. These guidelines are to emphasize agency
outreach to the interested public, and ongoing consultation with interested
parties, so as to ensure that such parties are given every opportunity to
participate in and influence the project review process. The
guidelines should provide for monitoring by this office to promote agency
compliance, and for intervention by this office in response to public concerns.
b. Simplify or eliminate routine review by this
office of agency determinations under 36
CFR §§ 800.4 and 800.5 and the equivalent sections of the EUHRA Section 601
procedures, provided the agency whose project is subject to review conducts
itself in accordance with our guidelines and there are no objections from the
public, local governments, or Indian tribes. This office should concur in determinations that no historic properties
are affected by a project, or that there will be no adverse effect, provided the
responsible agency demonstrates that it has followed our guidelines and has the
substantial agreement of Indian tribes, local governments, property owners,
historic preservation interests, and other consulting parties.
c. Establish that it is the role of this office to
(1) promote responsible, thoughtful attention by federal and state agencies to
the effects of their actions on the cultural environment, including but not
limited to historic properties, and to (2) mediate and facilitate negotiation
among such agencies and other interested parties to resolve the adverse effects
of such actions under 36 CFR §§ 800.6, the equivalent provisions of the EUHRA
Section 601 procedures, and other pertinent laws, regulations, and executive
d. Establish that this office will not invest substantial
staff time or budget in promoting review processes for their own sake, or in
promoting the preservation of properties in which Indian tribes, local governments,
historical, architectural, or archaeological interests, and the public, having
had a full opportunity to express interest, have not done so. I realize that some of these directions fly in the face of
long-standing policies and procedures articulated by the National Park Service
(NPS), an important source of funding for our operations. NPS policies and procedures are not engraved
in stone, however, and I am hopeful that NPS will recognize that the time has
come to explore alternatives that may be more responsive both to the public
interest and to fiscal reality. I look
forward to vigorous discussion of this matter with NPS and my colleagues in the
National Conference of SHPOs.
If you can’t get away with Three-I (inform, get input, and ignore) – if you actually have to sit
down and talk with people, give them the opportunity, in theory, to influence
your thinking through face-to-face discussion and/or extended correspondence –
there are still plenty of ways to limit your risk of actually having to
pay attention. Here are a few
One of the first things to do is to establish the presumptions
that will structure and control anything that resembles consultation. You need to control the conceptual
environment within which discussions will take place. In National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) terms, you need to define the purpose
of and need for your project in such a way as to minimize the range of
alternatives that are open for discussion. Say, for instance, that you’re proposing to put in a solar energy
project that will use thousands of acres of public land and have visual impacts
on thousands more. What’s the purpose of
this project, and why’s it needed? Well,
you might think that the purpose is to generate a lot of electricity in a
relatively clean way. You might think
that the need is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. But if you let purpose and need be defined
that way, there are quite a few alternatives that might be considered –
distributed solar panels on rooftops, solar over canals, solar in highway
medians, maybe wind energy, tidal energy, and geothermal. If it turns out that the site you want to use
is a tribe’s spiritual landscape, or the local community’s favorite place to
commune with nature, or the home of a lot of endangered squirrels and
sand-fleas, you may find a constituency developing for such alternatives, and
you’re going to spend a lot of time and money analyzing them.
But wait! You can argue
that the federal action here – the thing that requires review under NEPA and
the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in the U.S. system – isn’t the generation of energy! No, it’s the issuance of a right-of-way by
the federal land managing agency to allow you to put in the facility. So the need is for the agency either to issue
the right-of-way or not to; the purpose is to satisfy the agency’s regulatory
requirements. That means that the only
relevant alternatives are to issue the right-of-way or not to, or maybe to
issue it with a tweak here and an adjustment there. Once you have this established, then the
presumption that all the consulting parties – the serious ones, anyhow – must
share is that your project either (a) will go in and produce the public
benefits you claim, or (b) won’t go in and the public will be deprived of those
benefits. Your opponents are now arguing
against the public interest in affordable, clean energy and reducing greenhouse
gas emissions; they’re going to destroy the planet just to protect their
esthetic values or crazy religious beliefs or hangup with fuzzy critters. Needless to say, this will put them at a
This is a very popular and effective strategy in the U.S.,
particularly with Indian tribes since the 1990s when statutory changes and
executive orders increased the level of official rhetoric calling for tribal
consultation. It’s pretty simple; you
“consult” your potential opposition about everything, by sending them
letters – preferably OCLs (See “The Obscure ‘Consultation’ Letter,” above) – about
every project you consider, at each and every step in your planning, or about
each and every subdivision of your plan. Particularly if you’re communicating with an official body like a tribal
council or tribal or local historic preservation officer, they’re probably
getting similar letters from dozens of other agencies and project proponents;
their in-boxes are overflowing. Add to
the pile! And be sure to ask – ever so
politely – that they respond to you by a date certain, so you can show that,
gee, you tried, but they missed the deadline and you just had to move forward.
One way to confuse and discourage a potentially adversarial
consulting party is to invite them to “cooperate” or “collaborate” in your
project review. This can be useful
language to use in your OCL or public notice. The recipient or reader doesn’t want to cooperate with you, or be
a collaborator (Maybe she’s old enough to remember what that word meant in
Europe during World War II, or knows how it’s still used in some countries with
oppressive governments). She wants to stop
your project, or change it in some way. By inviting her to cooperate or collaborate, you may actually discourage
her participation. Conveniently, in
project review under NEPA, about the only way someone can actually be
consulted about the project – and then only if they’re a government agency – is
to be recognized as a “cooperating agency” (40 CFR §1501.6). Divide and Conquer
Easy as it is to be scornful of those who oppose or dislike your
project, you’ll benefit by recognizing that they’re complex human beings, each
with a range of concerns, values, and priorities. Why? Because you can exploit their differences. In my practice, I often deal with cases in which proposed projects
will destroy what archaeologists call archaeological sites, and what Indian
tribes or local communities think of as spiritually powerful ancestor places –
where ancestors’ bones were sent on to the next world, or where the elders
communicated with the spirits, and maybe still do. Neither tribal people nor archaeologists may
want the places destroyed, but they’re likely to be suspicious of one another,
and not readily inclined to cooperate as parts of an organized, strategic
opposition. Or maybe the Sierra Club’s
hydrologists say that anything over .2 parts per million of gunk in the PaleAle
Aquifer would be a problem, while to the local tribe anything above zero
parts per million would be intolerable, and they just can’t talk about it in terms
of how much is too much. If you have a
situation like this – not necessarily Indians and archaeologists, or Indians
and water quality experts but any case where potential consulting parties are
antagonistic toward one another, suspicious of one another, or have conflicting
world views – you can make good use of their differences. Subtly encourage them, build on them, and
play them up with other parties, particularly those with real power, like
regulatory agencies. There’s nothing
wrong with your project; you’re just caught in the middle between opposing
interests. You may not be able to escape
consultation altogether, but you should be able to keep the opposition
disorganized, preventing anyone from developing enough power to mount a serious
You can usually minimize participation – though you’ll probably
infuriate some consulting parties – by keeping the focus of the consultation as
narrow as possible. Insist on paying
attention only to the specific subject of whatever law or regulation is driving
the consultation, and define that subject as narrowly, rigidly, and arbitrarily
as you can. Or use some regulatory bureaucrat
to do so. If you’re consulting under
NHPA Section 106, you can try to make sure the agenda of each meeting is
organized around things like exactly what makes places eligible for the
National Register of Historic Places, using lots of shorthand references like
“Criterion C” and “contributing element.” If NEPA is your authority you can debate the fine points of impact
significance with reference to the definitions at 40 CFR 1508.27. When somebody starts emoting about how
important the Big Blue Oak or the Old Kissing Bridge is to the people of West
Easterly, you (or your consultants) can patiently explain that you really can’t
talk about these places unless and until they’ve been determined eligible for
the National Register of Historic Places. That’s not true under either NEPA or NHPA, but how are the West
Easterlians to know? And if they want to
worry about the fish that swim under the Old Kissing Bridge or the birds that
squawk in the branches of the Big Blue Oak – well, that’s a job for the professional
biologists, and the fish and birds really don’t matter (you can say) unless
they’re on a threatened or endangered species list. And the PaleAle Aquifer? Well, it’s surely much too big and
ill-bounded to be eligible for the National Register, so we really can’t deal
with it under NHPA – however culturally significant its water may be to the
tribe – and the water quality issues will be taken care of by the water quality
experts, so really, it’s off the table as a subject for consultation. You can pretty certainly count on official experts like – in the
U.S. – State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), the National Park Service
(NPS) and environmental protection agencies to support you in keeping the focus
tight and bureaucratically defined. Such
experts are usually comfortable picking professional and procedural nits, and they're unlikely
to feel invested in addressing stuff that’s just important to citizens. They’re also often pretty easy to dupe; I run
into a lot of SHPO and agency experts who may be perfectly competent architectural historians, archaeologists or wildlife biologists, but whose understanding of the relevant
laws and regulations is, to be charitable, very limited. After a meeting or two at which the professionals slice and dice
esoteric technicalities while everyone else sits and fumes, people will often throw
up their hands and go away. They may
write a nasty letter or two, but you can respond to these with meaningless
rhetoric (See OCL above).
This is particularly fun to do with Indian tribes and Native
Hawaiian groups in the U.S. You have
archaeological surveys done, or maybe even ethnographic studies asking tribal
members to cough up information on what they value in the environment, and then
you decline to share the resulting data with them, their lawyers, or their
allies (like environmental groups) because – you say solemnly – releasing the
data might endanger the sites and special places that have been recorded. Someone might go out and dig them up, or do
other terrible things to them. This naturally
limits the opposition’s ability to frame arguments against you, or at least
requires them to generate their own data, which you can usually discredit or
just ignore (See below).
In the U.S. there are legal grounds for keeping data on historic
places confidential[1]
– not very good legal grounds, but substantial enough to confuse people. You can count on archaeologists and
regulators to be supportive; they tend to be dogs in the manger when it comes
to information on their own special places, and keeping cultural places secret
is a knee-jerk response among Indian tribes.
If you’re not dealing with archaeological and historic sites, or
you’re not in the U.S., there may be other ways to hide data that could be
troubling. Maybe you can say it’s proprietary,
or needs to be kept confidential in the interests of national security. If you’re representing a government agency
you may have the authority to keep almost anything secret. And of course, you can always just lie.
Reliance on standards has become a popular way for some land
management agencies in the U.S. to avoid considering impacts on aspects of the
environment that don’t fit neatly into pre-defined bureaucratic
pigeonholes. Even if it’s not as big a
head-scratcher as whether the PaleAle Aquifer is a historic property – even if,
say, the local tribe says it’s the 10,000 square mile landscape overlying
the aquifer that’s culturally important -- you can rub your corporate or
bureaucratic chin and say “Hmm, we’re not sure how to relate anything that big
and ill-bounded to the regulations and guidelines on eligibility for the
National Register of Historic Places; we’ll have to study that.” Then keep assuring the world that you’re
studying the matter very earnestly, while in fact you're doing no such thing, and in
the meantime ignore the landscape and plan to take care only of the
“archaeological sites” that the proponent’s paid-for contractors have
oh-so-carefully defined in such a way as to be easily “avoided” by the mine
pits, haul roads and spoil heaps. Somebody may point out that what you're saying is that your information on cultural landscapes is incomplete, and according to the NEPA regulations if there’s
“incomplete or unavailable information” that’s relevant to determining
environmental impacts, you’re supposed either to get the information or explain
why you can’t (40 CFR 1502.22). To judge from recent cases I’ve seen, however, this
seems to be a pretty easy reminder to dodge.
Under U.S. laws like NEPA and NHPA Section 106, it’s the
responsible federal agency – or the project proponent at the agency’s direction
and with agency oversight – that’s supposed to collect, organize, and analyze
data on a project’s likely impacts. Often, though, it’s possible to shift this burden onto the shoulders of
the opposition. The tribe and
environmental group think the mine will pollute the aquifer? Well, they haven’t presented any studies
proving this to be the case. The people
of West Easterly think the Old Kissing Bridge is eligible for the National
Register? Well, they haven’t proved that
it is; why don’t they prepare a nomination form and see if they can get it
listed? If they buy this argument – and
many will, knowing no better – then they’ll have to go out and spend the money
to gather and organize and analyze the relevant data. They’ll have to gather comparative data on
aquifers and mines, collect and organize historical data, beat up tribal elders
to get them to share their spiritual secrets and traditional ecological
knowledge. Best of all, they’ll have to
present the data on your terms, or on the terms of the oversight
agencies – maybe even having to do things like nominating places to the
National Register, using the strange, utterly counterintuitive forms on which
NPS insists. By doing so, they’ll take
upon themselves the burden of proving the case, in the foreign – to them –
language of science and bureaucracy. They’ll probably fail, and waste a lot of time and money in the process. Meanwhile you can proceed with your planning
and ultimately with your project, while assuring everyone that you’re waiting
ever so respectfully for the tribe or the environmentalists or the West
Easterlians to make their case. If they
never do, or never do it to the satisfaction of the SHPO or the NPS or the
environmental regulators, well shucks, that’s not your fault.
Section 9 of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) and Section 301 of NHPA.
Claudia Nissley and I are wrapping up a book for Left Coast Press
on consultation under laws like Section 106 of the National Historic
Preservation Act (NHPA). Naturally it
promotes broad, inclusive consultation aimed at identifying and resolving
conflicts between the cultural environment and modern development. It should be out by mid-2014.
But what if you’re planning a project and you don’t want to
consult with people about it? What if
you know what you intend to do, and by damn, you’re going to do it? Or what if you’re the bought and paid-for
consultant (sic) for someone who doesn’t want to consult? I wanted to include a chapter in our book for
such folks, but Claudia talked me out of it. So I’ll present it here in three parts. You needn’t thank me.
Many U.S. laws, executive orders and regulations, as well as some international
conventions and other agreements or guidelines, call for project proponents and
government agencies to consult with those potentially affected by proposed
construction and land use projects. But
consultation is bothersome to government agencies and non-governmental project
sponsors alike; most would prefer to avoid it. After all, sponsors know what they want to do, and agencies usually have
their marching orders; consultation is unlikely to deflect them far from their
preferred courses of action. To them,
consultation is a costly, time-consuming frill. Under U.S. law, there are lots of ways to avoid, or at least
minimize, consultation when planning a project. It’s doubtless the same in other nations whose governments are more or
less similar to that of the United States. In nations with political systems that are dramatically different from
ours (e.g., China, Cuba) the same strategies may not work, but variants on them
doubtless will, and do. So, if you’re trying to put in a project and you want to avoid or
minimize consultation with an indigenous group, local residents, or just about
anyone else, here are a few strategies to consider. Each may not work by itself to spare you the
nuisance of consultation, but a combination usually will. If you can’t avoid consultation entirely,
some of these techniques may help you control the process and minimize its
You can try to consult only with those you’re absolutely required
by law to consult – the fish and wildlife agencies in the case of the
Endangered Species Act (ESA), the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO)
under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), agencies with
“jurisdiction by law or special expertise” (whatever you take that to mean)
under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). For the most part these consulting parties
will be government agencies that are probably sympathetic to your interests –
at least in their higher echelons where they’re sensitive to political pressure
and far from the on-the-ground effects of projects like yours. Even if they’re not entirely sympathetic, they’re
predictable; they have rules and customs, time frames and deadlines; they’re
used to taking part in polite meetings, composing and reading elliptical
letters and memos, and trying to be good team players. Or they’re satisfied to lodge their comments
and say “well, we’ve done what we could.” If worst comes to worst, they can be pressured by higher political
authority – the congressperson or president to whom you’ve made campaign
Federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States are
something of a special case, and minimizing consultation with them can be
tricky. The responsibility to consult
with such tribes is a broad one, with a lot of case law behind it. Every recent U.S. president has issued
direction to consult (without saying much about how and when to do it), and
every federal agency has its own internal guidance on the subject. So unless you can take the position that
whatever you’re proposing to do just hasn’t anything to do with tribal
interests, you’re probably stuck doing some kind of consultation. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be much
consultation; you may be able to employ one or more of the strategies outlined
below to keep it to a minimum.
Make FACA Your Friend In 1972, reflecting increasing public unease about secret
deal-cutting between government officials and outside groups, the U.S. congress
enacted the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). In essence, FACA forbids U.S. government
agencies from establishing and maintaining advisory groups made up of
non-government employees, unless the groups are structured and governed
according to strict regulations; their meetings have to be open, their
membership public, and so on.
If you’re a non-governmental entity in the U.S., it may be worth
considering arguing that the consulting parties seeking agreement about your
project under a law like Section 106 of the NHPA constitute an illegally
constituted advisory committee. They
probably don’t; federal agencies carry out hundreds of NHPA Section 106
consultations every year without running afoul of FACA, and there are fine
points in the interpretation of FACA and its implementing regulations (41 CFR
101-6) that are generally thought to let Section 106 consultation off the hook
(See King 2001:110-14). That said, an
implied threat to call the responsible agency to account for violating FACA may
have a chilling effect on consultation, making the responsible agency act more
formally and cautiously than it might otherwise behave, bringing more lawyers
to the table, and generally encumbering the discussions. This may not actually be to your advantage,
so the FACA card is one to be careful about playing, but it’s there to be
played if you think it will help you.
If you have to create the illusion of consultation with more than
a few controllable agencies or experts, the widely used “Three-I” or “I3”
Model is often effective. Using this
model, you tell the world (or selected parts of it) about your project, let
everyone say (or shout, scream, or sob) their pieces, assure them that you’ll
give every consideration to their concerns, and then proceed with whatever
you’re planning to do. Maybe make a
cosmetic adjustment here and there to create the illusion of responsiveness,
but don’t really do anything serious. Keep a good record of what everyone has said, how they’ve said it, and
maybe make up an account of how you’ve considered it. You can then assure the world, and whatever
regulators or courts you may have to deal with, that you’ve bent over backward
to accommodate people’s concerns. And
you usually will be able to demonstrate, if need be, that you’ve followed the
letter of the law, since most environmental and cultural resource laws and
regulations specify that public input be considered but don’t specify how to do
it, and either don’t explicitly require consultation or just use the word
without specifying what it means.
The obscure consultation letter (OCL) works particularly well with
Indian tribes, but it can be applied to any group. The idea is to write a letter to the group –
automatically creating an official record of your “good-faith” effort to
consult – but make it so obscure, so laden with bureaucratic and technical language,
that it’s virtually incomprehensible to any normal reader. Maybe include lots of attachments, too, the
more technical the better. In the case
of a tribe, send it off to the Chairman or Governor or President and hope for
the best. Chances are there will just
have been an election and the tribal offices will be all in flux, so the
package will get lost or misdirected. Even if that doesn’t happen, there’s a pretty good chance the OCL will
wind up on somebody’s desk who will just scratch his or her head, wonder what
it’s all about, not know what to do with it and as a result let it
languish. Give it thirty or sixty days,
say “well, we tried,” and move on. With a group that’s not a tribe, you can’t take advantage of the
confusion that’s commonly produced by tribal politics, but there’s still a good
chance your OCL will get lost, buried under other incoming paperwork, or be
puzzled over and argued about indefinitely rather than responded to with a
demand that you sit down with the group and consult. Post a Notice
When we consultants advise a corporate or government client that
they need to consult, we’re often asked if this means they need to post a
notice in the Federal Register, in
the local newspaper, on the worldwide web, or on the bulletin board at the
local Walmart. We respond that these things
may be among the ways to seek people with whom to consult, but by
themselves they don’t constitute consultation. Under some laws and regulations, though, posting a notice may be all
you’re actually required to do, and if nobody responds, you’re good to
go. If you can get away with this, then
of course you want to make the notice as unlikely as possible to attract
attention. As with a letter, if you can
make it obscure, use a lot of technical or legal terms, and avoid any
implication that the project might present environmental or cultural issues,
you may be able just to post the required notice – specifying a deadline for
comments, of course – and then wait to see what happens. If nothing happens by your deadline, and no
laws or regulations require you to do more, you can document what you’ve done
Americans in particular are suckers for public hearings. It may be easy – even effortless – to
maneuver opposition groups into reducing their demands for consultation to the
insistence that you hold a public hearing. So, then, hold one. But avoid, if
you can, any implication that it’s going to lead to anything, other than your
sober consideration of everyone’s “input,” to which you really don’t need to
give any consideration at all.
If you can manage it, keep your hearing as free-floating and
unfocused as possible. Make it a very
general hearing on your project, its pros and cons, so you get all kinds of participants
with all kinds of interests, most of whom just want the opportunity to spout
off. Make sure there are time limits – give
each person three or five or six-point-three minutes to speak. Make sure that a lot of project supporters attend, and are as
vocal as possible. Pay them to come, if
need be, and give them scripts. If your
project will (according to you, anyway) generate jobs, you can probably get
unions to encourage their members to come, waving signs and pounding the
floor. Vocal project opponents can be
helpful, too, particularly if they’re obvious nutcases; in the public eye their
nuttiness will rub off on the whole opposition.
Document the hearing; keep good minutes and other records, so you
can show anyone who asks that you really did a great job of consultation. There’s a very good chance the opposition
won’t be able to figure out how to insist on more, and if you’ve conned them
into demanding a hearing, they’ll have little ground on which to build an
objection; you’ve given them a hearing.
The “listening session,” which has become popular in the early 21st
century, is a variant on the public hearing. A listening session quite explicitly isn’t intended to have an outcome;
you just listen to what people have to say, act sympathetic, and then – well,
then it depends. A listening session can
lead into real consultation: having heard that the opposition is really
concerned about the neighborhood or creek or lake, and having maybe even come
to understand something about why they’re concerned and what they think ought
to be done, you can go forward to engage in real, informed,
consultation. But you can often get away
with treating the listening session as consultation, and making it your
one and only “consultative” activity. It
can make you look oh-so respectful of the opposition’s views, and give you
cover while you do nothing whatever to address them.
In planning a public hearing or listening session, be sure to be
sensitive to environmental justice issues – make sure the session is open and
convenient to whatever minority or low-income groups may be affected, and if
need be get a translator so you can say you’ve really tried to communicate. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a relevant
translator – if you’re faced with an Indian tribe whose elders preferentially speak
their own obscure language, you can probably get away with a Spanish
translator. You don’t have to make
anybody understand anything, or come away from the session understanding
anything yourself; you just need to appear sensitive. Source cited
Planning and Historic Places: the Section 106 Process.
MD, Altamira Press
in Part 2: Discouraging Dissent
If you’re a landowner, an Indian tribe, a neighborhood
group, or anyone else considering litigation against a federal agency for
failure to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
(NHPA), I have some advice for you. Most
of it’s in my various books, but it seems like it might be helpful to toss it
out in the form of a short, organized paper. Yes, lawyers, here I am once again practicing law without a license;
Potential litigants deprive themselves of some of their best
weapons by accepting too much of what “experts” and government authorities say
about the law and its requirements. Congress enacted Section 106 of NHPA to protect the American people and
the historic places they hold dear from undue despoliation by federal
government agencies and those they license or assist. Over the decades, the government has allowed
the law to be warped into affording such protection mostly just to things valued
by narrow disciplinary specialists and agency bureaucrats. But that’s custom, not law; the law itself,
and the regulations (36 CFR Part 800) cast a broader net and give citizens more
voice. The trick is to avoid getting
sucked in by the authoritative talk of the 106 bureaucrats and consultants;
focus instead on what the law and regulations actually say.
So, here are some questions to ask and things to consider
when an agency says it’s complying with Section 106 and you don’t think it’s
properly considering impacts on something that’s important to you.
1. Did the agency’s people contact and consult with
you when developing the scope of work for identification of historic places? The regulations (36 CFR 800.3(f) and
800.4(a)(3)) require that they identify consulting parties (like you) and then
seek information from such parties in defining the scope. Obviously, doing this is critical to finding,
or even seeking, the places and effects that are important to you, but many if
not most agencies skip it, and State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs)
seldom remind them.
It’s a good idea to contact the responsible
federal agency early on and tell them that you want to be a consulting party;
this isn’t mandatory, but it makes it harder for them to ignore you. Be sure to contact the relevant federal
agency, not just whatever state or local agency or private developer may be
involved. It’s the federal agency that
has responsibilities under Section 106. Contact the SHPOtoo, but don’t expect them to do anything; they aren’t
responsible for enforcing the law.
2. Did they define the area of potential effects
(APE) correctly? The APE is supposed to
include all the areas where the project could have effects on historic places –
if any such places turn out to be there (In other words, the agency doesn’t
need to know there’s a historic place involved; that’s something it has to find
out). “Effects” include direct and
indirect effects, and whatever contributions the project may make to cumulative
effects. Effects of all three kinds can
include physical, visual, auditory, olfactory, or any other kind of effects,
providing they can somehow, in theory, alter the character or use of a historic
place. A change in an area’s olfactory
regime, for example – making it smellier – might alter the use of historic houses
(if any are there) by driving out their residents. Agencies commonly define the APE only to
include the construction footprint of the project, or mix up “direct effects”
with “direct physical effects.” You
should be alert to this kind of thing, and raise questions or object. If they blow you off, make sure that’s
documented; it can be a good basis for showing that they’ve not complied with
3. What have they done (or what are they proposing
to do) to identify potentially affected historic places? Land managing agencies like the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) can be pretty reliably expected to confuse “identify
historic places” with “send archaeologists out to find archaeological
sites.” Urban development agencies
routinely conflate identification with sending architectural historians out to
determine what styles the buildings represent, and whether any famous
architects were involved in their design. Agencies of all kinds routinely ignore or just don’t think about
cultural landscapes, culturally important plants and animals (that may
contribute to the significance of such landscapes), culturally valued
neighborhoods, parks, streetscapes and rural areas, and culturally valued
water-bodies and offshore areas. If you
value any such place – if it figures somehow in your history and/or cultural
practices or beliefs, you ought to object strongly and loudly to an agency’s
failure to do the kind of identification work that would find and consider it. Again, if they blow you off, document it, and
don’t stop objecting. Don’t accept a
statement that they have only to identify nice old buildings and archaeological
sites, or historic places as appreciated by their professional consultants or
the SHPO. If the place is important to
you, and/or your community, your tribe, your family, then the responsible
agency ought at least to consider whether it’s eligible for the National
Register of Historic Places (NRHP).
4. How have they evaluated places to decide whether
they’re eligible for the NRHP? It’s
very, very common for evaluation to be done in very black boxes, by
narrowly-qualified professionals who don’t talk to a soul outside their own
particular complex of cubicles. Or if
they do talk to anyone, it’s only to the SHPO. They often apply very narrow-minded interpretations of the NRHP Criteria
(36 CFR 60.4). Such evaluations can and
should be challenged, to the relevant agency and to the Advisory Council on
Historic Preservation (ACHP) and Keeper of the NRHP in the National Park
Service. This may or may not get you
anyplace, but raising questions about eligibility, early and often, is
important in establishing a good documentary record on which you can draw in
litigation. Challenge both the
procedures (e.g. failure to consult anybody concerned with the property) and
the standards on which evaluation was based. Even if they found that the place is eligible for the NRHP, look
critically at their finding; they may have used tricky language that will
enable them to say that whatever they’re doing won’t really affect what makes
the place significant. Which of course might
be true, but most times isn’t.
5. Have they done an honest and thorough job of
determining what adverse effects the project may have on historic places? A common ploy is to say that there won’t be
any adverse effect (or any effect of any kind) because a place will ostensibly
be “avoided” by construction. This
conflates “adverse effect” with “direct physical damage or destruction,”
ignoring visual, auditory, and other such effects. It also assumes that the place has been
properly and accurately defined, so it’s possible to determine whether one has
avoided it or not. Very commonly in the
west, agencies will ignore large cultural landscapes in favor of considering
only individual archaeological sites within them, then define the
archaeological sites more or less arbitrarily, and then say they’ll all be
avoided so everything’s fine. If you’re
concerned with the landscape, or even just with the sites, you ought to call
them on this and insist that they consider the project’s real effects on the
places that are really important.
6. What have they done (or what do they propose to
do) to resolve the adverse effects? This
basically means somehow mitigating effects on them, and of course it requires
that the places and the effects are reasonably well identified. Even if these have been well identified,
however, the agency may still slither out from under doing anything much about
them. A common ploy is to develop a
Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that is so ponderous, contorted, and laden with
vague abstractions that it’s virtually impossible to decipher. MOAs are supposed to be negotiated among the
consulting parties, but they often aren’t; the agency just has an MOA drafted
and slaps it down in front of everybody to sign. If you don’t understand what you’re being
asked to sign, you obviously shouldn’t sign it, and you should object. Another common practice is to include “kick-the-can”
provisions, saying that something that ought to be done before the MOA is even
considered (like evaluating historic properties and effects) will be done after
the project is approved and underway. Occasionally there are good reasons for such provisions, but the burden
of proof should be on those proposing them to demonstrate why they’re necessary
and appropriate. Often, too, MOAs will
deal only with direct, physical effects on specific buildings or sites,
ignoring broader, less direct impacts or impacts on landscapes and other relatively
big, loosely defined places. DON’T WAIT to raise these issues
until you’re ready to go to court. If
you can’t show that you raised them during the agency’s administrative process
(that is, its project review under NHPA and NEPA), and got ignored or given
short shrift, the court is unlikely to accept them as issues meriting a legal
remedy. So get involved in the review as
early as possible in the process, be vigorous in pushing for proper
consideration of your concerns, and DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. You may hope you don’t have to go to court,
but you ought to be prepared to.