When people flip a light switch, or plug in their iPad, or turn on the oven, they want those things to work…which they won’t, if the power supply is down. That’s why in 2009, Bonneville Power Administration embarked on a process to build a 79-mile transmission line in southwest Washington – and why they hired EnviroIssues to help.
EI is assisting with communications strategy, meeting facilitation, gathering and analyzing public comments for this project which crosses two states, three counties, and public and private lands. As if that weren’t complex enough, stakeholders are concerned on a number of fronts: property values, easements, private timberlands, impacts to wetlands, wildlife, and water, and quality of life, to name a few.
As part of the NEPA process, we helped BPA with multiple public meetings, drop-in sessions, and staffed multiple local events to educate stakeholders and others about the project. A project of this magnitude will generate a lot of comments – more than 14,500 so far – and we’ve processed, analyzed, categorized, and tracked all of them using EnviroLytical, information we used as we drafted a scoping summary, comment reports, comment analysis for the draft EIS, and a summary of comments received.
We continue to coordinate with BPA, collecting, tracking, and analyzing comments through completion of the final EIS (scheduled for the end of 2014).
At EnviroIssues, the more complicated the project, the more energized we get!