> give stakeholders 60 days to comment

I want to point out that while giving people time to comment sounds harmless, it's actually a systemic problem that's at the root of many issues.

Allowing special interest groups to delay development is a major reason why it's nearly impossible to build anything on time and on budget in the US.

If they don't cancel the project outright, or prevent it from starting in the first place via chilling effects, then the delays increase the price tag enormously.

Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic often writes about this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-gove...

> Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy.

> Across the country, angry residents and neighborhood associations have the power to delay, reshape, and even halt entirely the construction of vital infrastructure. To put a fine point on it: Deference to community input is a big part of why the U.S. is suffering from a nearly 3.8-million-home shortage and has failed to build sufficient mass transit, and why renewable energy is lacking in even the most progressive states.

> . . .

> Every new development has so-called negative externalities: Construction is always annoying, trains can be loud and unsightly, wind farms may obstruct ocean views, and for some the simple knowledge that a nearby home is actually a duplex is enough to ruin the neighborhood character. Regardless of how valid you find any of these complaints, they should not by themselves be sufficient to block new projects, or else no mass transit, no new housing, no wind or solar farms could ever be installed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/national-e...

> Signed into law in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state and local equivalents require federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of major projects before they sign off on them. Supporters argue that NEPA “empowers local communities to protect themselves and their environment.”

> But NEPA is more burdensome than it may sound. As the economist Eli Dourado has documented, environmental-impact statements were initially very short—just 10 pages, in some instances. But now they average more than 600 pages, include more than 1,000 pages of appendices, and take four and a half years on average to complete.

> How did this happen? Lawyers—the answer is always lawyers. Over time, the courts have embraced more and more expansive definitions of what these statements should cover. And lawyers—terrified of getting their clients caught up in lengthy court proceedings where a judge tells them they should have thought through the fourth- or fifth-order impacts of an apartment building—spend eons fleshing them out. The goal is not to mitigate environmental ill effects but to get an A+ for thoroughness.

> . . .

> Caution and deliberation are good in moderation, but waiting cannot relieve this uncertainty; it merely changes its form. Doing can cause harm, but not doing won’t preserve the world in amber. Neighborhoods in desirable communities that don’t build more housing see skyrocketing prices and demographic shifts toward high-income, white, and older residents. And nations that don’t build the necessary renewable-energy infrastructure will be subject to the very environmental degradation that 20th-century activists tried so hard to prevent.

> The unforeseen consequences of blocking change should weigh as heavily as the ones that come from allowing it. Those lost students, missing refugees, absent neighbors, and failed government projects may never intrude on our sight line or cause us frustration during our commutes, but they cost us all the same.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/environmen...

> Delays run up the cost of vital infrastructure and exert something like a chilling effect on new projects, as developers may not want to contend with the expensive legal battles that lie ahead. These laws have been used to stymie wind farms in Nantucket (residents dubiously claim that offshore wind kills whales), Martha’s Vineyard (the owner of the solar company that opposes the project lives near the proposed site part-time), and dozens of other purportedly progressive communities across the country.

> . . .

> Consider the way NEPA preemptively chills development or the fact that the delays themselves are costly. The economist Eli Dourado has studied NEPA’s failures for years, and he is skeptical that thoroughness and time spent should be read as a policy success: “If every review were done so thoroughly that it took 100 years to complete and the resulting lawsuit rate were zero, that would be a failure, not a success.” The problem is “the threat of litigation continuously increases the burden of NEPA review, rendering our agencies unable to make speedy decisions even in cases where it is obvious there is no significant environmental impact,” Dourado told me.