Landmark Bill Will Create ’24-Second Shot Clock’ To Unleash American Industry, Experts Say

Public policy experts petitioned Congress to pass a bipartisan permitting reform bill at the Daily Caller Live’s “Breaking The Permitting Bottleneck” panel Tuesday morning.

Ted Ellis, Director of Energy at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and Ben Lieberman, Senior Fellow of Energy and Environment at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke with Daily Caller White House correspondent Ashley Brasfield about the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which the Senate advanced Monday. The bill seeks to expedite the permitting process for construction projects in the U.S.

“I like the idea of a shot clock. I watched an NBA game the other day and the NBA has a 24-second shot clock. I don’t know if that’s enough time for the permitting process, but I like the idea of a shot clock. [The permitting process] shouldn’t be dragging on for 5, 10 or even 30 years,” Lieberman told the panel.

The permitting reform and infrastructure bill seeks to reduce the statute of limitations for when objections to construction projects can be filed. Currently, projects face obstacles years after capital has been invested in them, increasing the likelihood they are canned altogether.

“An example of projects delayed equals project canceled is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” Ellis explained. “The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was a pipeline that was mile-long natural gas pipeline that was supposed to flow from West Virginia to North Carolina, and it was supposed to produce something like 17,000 jobs over the course of the several years that it was going to be developed. But because of activist litigation and permitting uncertainty, the timeline kept slipping.”

“The cost was moving from $5 billion to $8 billion. Eventually the project developers won at the Supreme Court, seven-two, but after that much delay and after the cost ballooned that much, they decided less than three weeks after the case was decided that they would have to cancel the project because it just simply became uneconomical,” he added.

Ellis wrote about the pipeline in a Nov. 6 op-ed for the Daily Caller News Foundation he co-authored with AFPI Vice Chair for Energy & Environment Policy Oliver McPherson-Smith.

“The opportunity is in making it easier to build in America: ensuring that projects receive timely approvals and have reasonable certainty that their work won’t be stopped or their issued permit overturned,” Ellis and McPherson-Smith wrote. “The proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) shows how the current environment has gone awry.”

Reducing obstacles in front of construction projects would decrease costs and subsequently the cost of living, the panelist said.