Practice Areas: Environmental Solutions

Permitting

The construction or expansion of industrial plants, power production facilities, solid waste facilities, towns, mines and malls, whether in green fields or brown, requires a host of permits.

We have years of experience at identifying the permits and approvals necessary for a project, and this identification process is how we begin most of our undertakings. For many, if not most permits, we believe that the application itself should be prepared by environmental consultants or engineers because they often have the necessary information readily available. But from there on we believe that we have the strongest team to make certain that permitting is completed as quickly as possible, with as few problems as possible. We provide complete project permitting management for clients all across North America. This allows our clients to bring any number of specialty consultants onto their team without fear of contradictory permit provisions or fatally flawed time frames. We provide project management control data to our clients and "troubleshooting" for any problems that occur in the permitting process, whether the problems relate to the regulations, the regulators or project opponents.

We have a large "toolkit" of approaches and techniques that can help insure project success, ranging from targeted community relations campaigns to "green solutions"—socially and environmentally responsible approaches to traditional engineering issues.

When we have helped to deliver the project permitting package, we can provide further support in the form of legal opinions that provide assurances for lenders and new equity participants that all of the permitting necessary for construction and operation of the facility has been appropriately completed.

For large and small projects we can provide a full range of support activities. Specific team leaders effectively utilize their experience and knowledge when approaching each project, bringing outside experts to the table when appropriate.

Representative Work

• Obtaining and defending air and water operating permits for numerous generating and manufacturing facilities in Illinois.
• Obtaining many of the permits and entitlements for, and managing all of the permitting of a new town in Virginia; the town includes 4,000 residential units and three quarters of a million square feet of commercial space and was planned with an aggressive social and environmental agenda;
• Reviewing and adjusting the permits and approvals necessary to purchase and operate the power production portions of paper plants in California, Alabama, Virginia and Illinois;
• Identifying the necessary permits as well as the likely time periods and expenses required to obtain the permit for a titanium mine covering two counties in Virginia, a clay mine, and a major theme park proposed in Virginia;
• Providing management and trouble shooting for permitting solid waste transfer stations in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia;
• Obtaining many of, and managing all of the permits for one of the largest landfills on the east coast;
• Obtaining the first private solid waste transfer station permit in Maryland;
• Designing a complete "green" program for a large scale residential development in North Carolina to assist it in obtaining necessary permits and approvals; and
• Greenfield permitting for a 600 megawatt power production facility as well as four other power production facilities ranging from 200 to 400 megawatts each; the plants range from coal to gas to biomass.