Techniques and guidelines for streamlining NEPA

Five ideas for streamlining both the NEPA process and documents are explored for preparers of NEPA documents. Techniques and guidelines that implement these ideas will be provided as effective worksheets, pithy guidelines, flowcharts, and examples. The five streamlining ideas and the techniques or guidelines to achieve them are: (1) emphasize early planning through concise definition of project scope, purpose, need, and proposed action; determine need for compliance with applicable environmental requirements. (2) develop effective worksheets that include purpose, need, and proposed action; issue analysis; alternatives; environmental consequences; and NEPA checklist. (3) use information services/databases to integrate information services and identify existing databases. (4) maximize use of tables and graphs for analysis of alternatives; assumptions used (bounding analyses); environmental consequences. (5) create inviting documents with clear, concise writing; summarize in text; supporting data in appendices; and inviting visual layouts.