NY Daily News: Joe Manchin’s right: We need permitting reform

In November 2016, Seattle voters approved a plan to expand the city’s light rail transit system. Almost six years later, the project still hasn’t properly begun. Instead, in January 2022 the city’s Sound Transit released a draft of their required Environmental Impact Statement, which ran more than 8,000 pages long. The final version of this EIS won’t be ready until 2023, at which point the project will already have spent hundreds of millions of dollars before a single shovel hits the ground. Current timelines, which might be delayed, call for services on the new lines to be open by 2039.