Concurrent Sessions VI | April 30 | 2:45 PM – 4:15 PM

Come learn what road blocks a state-wide joint EIR/EIS can have and ways we overcame them including the additional challenges of a world-wide pandemic and completing the project in the new normal.

Topics will include a project overview, taking over a project like this in the middle of the project, how to most efficiently handle personnel changes on the State and Federal Interdisciplinary Team, discussion of project budget and scope creep, managing timelines/schedule, and getting to the finish line. Will also discuss top takeaways for the next project like this including what I would do differently. The example project is the California Wildlife Damage Management EIR/EIS. This unique project conducted a comprehensive analysis/evaluation of agricultural resources, biological resources, hazards and hazardous materials, human and companion animal health and safety, noise, and public services. It considered all levels of wildlife management (individual, small producers/farmers, local and regional agricultural commissions, wildlife management agencies (regulatory agencies), and the California Department of Food and Agriculture). It serves as an interface between federal, state, and local/regional wildlife specialists. As part of this project an adaptable toolbox was created that allows for local/regional practitioners to develop individualized programs that tier off the programmatic EIR/EIS to make the implementation of local programs more efficient and streamlined.

Session Objectives:

• Identify Project Management strategies that worked prior to the pandemic and post-pandemic as well as ones that don't
• Explore changes to engaging with the public during the public scoping and comment periods
• Analyze the impacts to schedule and budget created by IDT changes
• Examine efficiencies and challenges created by producing a joint NEPA/CEQA document

Jason Reynolds
Transportation Practice Director
Dudek

Speaker Information Coming Soon.

Michelle Ogburn
Senior Project Manager
Dudek

Speaker Information Coming Soon.

Speaker Bio Coming Soon.

In 2019, the AEP Climate Change Committee reviewed a database of over 600 climate action plans adopted by cities and counties in the State of California to determine the successes and challenges local governments encountered in the implementation of the plans. The Committee then selected fifty climate action plans considered CEQA qualified plans for an interim review. Finally, the Committee focused on nine climate action plans for in-depth reviews that included a review of each specific greenhouse gas reduction strategy within these plans and monitoring mechanisms to determine which ones were the most successful in reducing emissions. The results were presented in the 2019 AEP White Paper on Best Practices in Climate Action Planning and presented at the NAEP 2019 Annual Conference and Training Symposium.

This Session reviews the changes and progress made in the same climate action plans analyzed in 2019. Specifically, the review included a close look at the various types and differences of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were successful in agricultural communities, mountain and desert communities, as well as large coastal cities including San Diego, Los Angeles and New York City. The review also looked at large inland cities including Austin Texas and Denver Colorado. Each of these regions had a different focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that coincides with the economic sectors that dominate the city or county. Based upon the AEP Climate Change Committee review, the panel will provide recommended best practices and how these climate action plans have changed in the last five years. The panel will provide guidance on target setting, reduction strategies, implementation strategies, funding, and monitoring systems used within successful climate action plans for the various regions listed above. The panelists will include updated best practices that are applicable for climate action plans outside of California including reduction target setting that fits into the international efforts and are feasible to achieve.

Objectives of the Session:

• Inform the audience on National trends in climate action planning over the last five years
• Explain the differences in climate action plans within different regions of the Country
• Provide guidance in climate action planning based on a review of the plans over the last five years specific to each region of the County

Michael Hendrix
AEP Climate Change Committee Chair
AEP 

Michael Hendrix is a leading climate change scientist with over 28 years of experience. He has authored 78 climate action plans throughout the United States. Mr. Hendrix is the recipient of the AEP "Professional Achievement Award". AEP recognized that his commitment to balancing the need for development with the need for climate resiliency, reduction of GHGs, is evident through his dedication to resiliency planning, air quality and GHG emissions evaluations and mitigation that significantly reduce potential risks, greenhouse gases and air pollution generated by the expansion of these markets.

Mr. Hendrix is the current Chairperson for the AEP Climate Change Committee. In that capacity, he provides leadership within AEP on climate change risks, resiliency, and GHGs.

Rich Walter
Vice President
ICF

Rich Walter has 30 years of experience in environmental planning, compliance strategy, permitting, and mitigation development and implementation. He serves as project director/environmental lead for environmental planning for large-scale infrastructure projects for public agencies and private clients. Rich has also led ICF's California Municipal Climate Action Planning practice since 2006 which has developed climate action plans, and GHG inventories for hundreds of communities across the U.S., general plan policies for climate change, cost-benefit analyses of emission reduction strategies, climate adaptation studies (including sea level rise), as well as numerous CEQA and NEPA documents addressing GHG emissions and adaptation.

Brian Schuster
Director Air Quality, Climate, Acoustics
ESA 

Brian has over 15 years of management and technical air quality and GHG experience. He has provided Climate Action Plans (CAPs) for public and private agencies. He has authored more than 30 CEQA and NEPA documents. In his CAP work, Brian designs GHG inventories, evaluates GHG reduction measures, authors planning documents, and engages stakeholders through outreach. As Project Manager, Brian led CAP projects for the counties of San Bernardino, Sonoma, Marin, and Los Angeles, and for the City of Ontario. He has also designed a number of interactive excel models for clients, including GHG inventorying tools, a lifecycle GHG waste tool, a health risk assessment screening tool, GHG reduction measure planning tools, and GHG reduction measure implementation tracking tools.

Bria Pope
Student
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

Bria Pope is a second-year master's student in Environmental Science at Florida A&M University and a NOAA CCME-II Scholar. Advised by Dr. Steven Morey, Dr. Marcia Owens, and Dr. Amy Freitag (NCCOS), her research focuses on how green infrastructure can enhance shoreline resilience and preserve cultural resources in Baltimore. Through her NOAA NERTO project, Bria generated data for models assessing shoreline vulnerability and infrastructure effectiveness, presenting findings to NOAA stakeholders and academic audiences. She aims to influence policy by bridging science, advocacy, and law, shaping policies that promote sustainability and equity in environmental and agricultural systems.

Environmental exposure to lead and copper through our drinking water systems has been recognized as the cause of a variety of health problems. The EPA's Lead and Copper Rule Revision (LCRR) reached its first major deadline in October 2024. The LCRR Rule mandates that, following inventory development, all water systems develop a lead service line replacement program that considers equity and environmental justice (EJ) as part of the process. This presentation will use real project examples from across the United States to illustrate different approaches for incorporating equity and EJ into replacement plans. The first section of the presentation will cover publicly available data sources. This will include a brief overview of commonly used datasets, like the Census Bureau's American Community Survey results, relevant attributes, and their available formats (i.e. tables, feature classes). Next, we will provide examples of how geospatial and statistical analysis of these data can help uncover potential environmental justice concerns and identify relevant equity considerations. Finally, we will use visualization tools like dashboards and web applications to illustrate how EJ and equity considerations are incorporated into lead pipe replacement plans, and how they can be incorporated into other environmental programs such as Brownfields, State led Remedial Programs, and Climate Resiliency.

Attendees can expect to leave this session with a better understanding of:

• Publicly available data sources related to EJ and equity
• Geospatial analysis involving EJ & equity, and
• Visualization tools for communicating equity and EJ analysis to stakeholders

Amy Kopale 
GIS and Remote Sensing Specialist
CDM Smith

Amy is a GIS and remote sensing specialist at CDM Smith with experience in geospatial analysis and modeling. Her project work often involves leveraging open source and commercial data to better understand and solve human-environmental problems. She is experienced in remote sensing principles and applications, with expertise in leveraging optical remote sensing data and machine learning for environmental analysis.

Federal agencies face increasing pressure to expedite environmental reviews for critical energy and infrastructure projects. While projects that draw large numbers of public comments provide agencies insight into public perspectives and concerns, the sheer volume may exceed the staff's capacity to review and tabulate in a timely manner. In multiple domains, the advent of language models (LMs) has accelerated text-based workflows, but adoption is encumbered by concerns regarding safety, explainability, and bias. How can we responsibly leverage LMs to compile and summarize public comments on projects with significant environmental impacts in an auditable manner without generating additional work for reviewing agencies?

In this work, we explore the use of so-called "agentic" architectures or "language model programs" to expose the core task of scoping potential environmental impacts as a form of exploratory data analysis. Our goal is to allow domain experts to interact with the data generated by public comments at an aggregate level while exposing artifacts such as citations and explanations to audit on demand. The key insights of our work are to 1) decompose data-processing pipelines that use LMs into sequences of small logical steps with constraints that can be audited and verified autonomously, leveraging human expertise and insight at a higher level than individual steps, and 2) utilize LM vector embeddings to place comments in a high-dimensional vector space for interactive clustering. By leveraging these techniques, we can present domain experts with an interface to quickly and consistently identify and summarize in-scope environmental concerns while exposing processing steps for human validation.

Learning Objectives

Leverage AI to streamline environmental public comment processing workflow.

Reilly Raab, PhD
Title
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Reilly Raab recently completed his PhD in computer science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he performed research in developing safe AI/ML systems for high-stakes decisions while accounting for dynamical feedback. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and was named an ARCS scholar in 2022.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes waves across diverse industries, it holds exciting potential for enhancing public engagement and accessibility in environmental planning. At Pond, we're collaborating with partners like the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) and others to explore AI's role in streamlining complex review processes and supporting more inclusive public involvement in environmental projects. One promising area we're exploring involves using AI to streamline the processing of public comments on major federal projects.
Although still in the conceptual stage, we envision that this approach could showcase how AI can efficiently manage the collection and response process for public feedback, making it easier for stakeholders to engage and contribute to environmental decision-making. Additionally, our active partnership with GDOT through the USDOT Modernizing NEPA Challenge is already laying a foundation for AI to the NEPA process.

Learning Objectives

• Introduce the Potential of AI in Environmental Planning: Highlight how AI can transform public engagement and accessibility in environmental planning by simplifying complex processes and improving stakeholder involvement.
• Showcase Collaborative AI Initiatives with GDOT: Share insights into ongoing partnerships, including the USDOT Modernizing NEPA Challenge with GDOT, which aims to use AI to streamline and modernize the public involvement process.
• Inspire Broader Adoption of AI-Driven Engagement: Discuss the potential for AI to create a more inclusive and equitable public engagement framework, encouraging session participants to consider similar innovations in their own work

Lauren Schramm 
NEPA Manager
Pond and Company

Lauren Schramm is an experienced NEPA Manager at Pond & Company, where she leads a team of six NEPA professionals, ensuring successful project delivery for transportation and defense clients, including Categorical Exclusions (Catexs) and Environmental Assessments (EAs). She excels in managing budgets, schedules, and quality while building strong client relationships and driving business development. Previously, Lauren served as a NEPA Planner at Edwards-Pitman Environmental, Inc., where she prepared environmental documentation and collaborated with clients and agencies. She also worked as a Project Manager II at Trileaf Corporation, managing client relationships across 29 states and leading a team in delivering diverse environmental assessments, including FCC NEPA reviews and Section 106s

The field of generative artificial intelligence is advancing at breathtaking speed. This paper will cover the latest updates in generative AI and large language models and their derivative tools. Methods for applying AI tools and models to improve the efficiency of high quality NEPA analysis and review procedures, technical content preparation and comments responses in EAs and EISs will be discussed.

Learning Objectives

Highlight the potential for using advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence to improve the efficiency of NEPA analyses and documentation.

Krish Vijayaraghavan
Principal
Ramboll

Krish Vijayaraghavan is a NEPA specialist with over 20 years of experience in environmental practice. He has directed Environmental Impact Statements and Environmental Assessments under NEPA to assess and disclose impacts for power, energy, aviation, surface transportation, reclamation, mining, and other natural resource projects with stakeholders from BLM, FAA, USACE, DOE, NHTSA, OSMRE, BOR, FRA, USAF, BOEM, NPS, USFWS and other agencies. His technical area of expertise is computer modeling, air quality and greenhouse gas/climate change analysis and Artificial Intelligence. Krish led the team that won the DOE Artificial Intelligence NEPA competition on LLMs for Environmental Reviews. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals and co-authored two technical books.