Regulators at the U.S. Maritime Administration have gone through a draft environmental assessment for the Lutak Dock and sent it back to Haines Borough’s contractor Solstice with a list of questions to answer.
In addition to answering those questions, Solstice must now go through the document and scrub certain language that is out of compliance with new federal guidelines.
Acting Manager Alekka Fullerton told the planning commission last week that she’d received new guidance from MARAD on how environmental assessments should be written, and forwarded that along to Solstice to incorporate into the borough’s Lutak Dock assessment.
According to that March 6 email Fullerton received – and later sent to the Chilkat Valley News in response to a records request – the Director of the Office of Environmental Compliance for MARAD, Kris Gilson, requested that its grantees remove or avoid any reference to climate change or environmental justice in the assessments.
“If we have your EA in the review queue, we will flag or redline the above, but please make sure you double check your document when we send it back,” Gilson wrote.
The move comes as the Trump Administration rolls back executive orders that made climate change and environmental justice, which is the idea that agencies should consider how pollution will impact poor and minority communities.
Both were policy centerpieces of the previous presidential administration.
Gilson also wrote in the email that she anticipates it will take extra time to get through the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, process.
That’s because the agency is working to update its NEPA procedures in response to an executive order seeking significant changes to how agencies can review projects.
“Over the next several months, the MARAD NEPA Team is going to be diligently working on updating our NEPA procedures,” Gilson wrote.
“While this is a pretty big lift for us in a short amount of time, we are confident that the updated procedures will benefit us all in streamlining the process.”