Georgia is one comment period away from running its own federal environmental reviews. FHWA published a proposed memorandum of understanding on Oct. 2 that would give the Georgia Department of Transportation NEPA assignment for nearly every federal-aid highway project in the state. GDOT, not the federal division office, would sign the environmental assessments and impact statements that gate a letting.
Comments close Nov. 2.
What Georgia’s NEPA assignment covers
The Federal Register notice says GDOT filed its application on Sept. 2 under 23 U.S.C. 327, the Surface Transportation Project Delivery Program. The draft MOU assigns project-level NEPA decisions on highway work that uses Title 23 money or needs an FHWA approval, including Local Agency Program jobs off the state system. The consultation load comes with it: the Endangered Species Act, Section 106, Section 4(f), the Clean Water Act and roughly two dozen other laws the notice lists.
A companion notice published the same day proposes a second MOU under Section 326 that covers categorical exclusions alone. Georgia asked for that one in October 2025. Categorical exclusions are the large majority of federal-aid highway approvals, so the smaller agreement may matter more to a resurfacing or bridge replacement schedule than the bigger one does.
What FHWA keeps under the proposed MOU
- Project-level air quality conformity determinations under the 327 agreement.
- Formal government-to-government consultation with tribes.
- Federal Lands Highway work GDOT doesn’t design and build, projects that cross state lines, and Recreational Trails projects.
- Projects advanced by direct recipients other than GDOT, including competitive-grant winners and TIFIA borrowers.
- Project DeRenne in Savannah, three project IDs that already have a draft EIS out.
GDOT also can’t declare a constructive use of a Section 4(f) property without FHWA’s approval first.
GDOT takes the lawsuits along with the signature
Assignment isn’t free. The state has to consent to exclusive federal court jurisdiction for the duties it assumes, and GDOT’s application carries state attorney general letters certifying that it can. In plain terms, when someone sues over an EIS, GDOT is the defendant.
That point drew pushback during the state’s own comment round, which ran July 8 to Aug. 23. The Southern Environmental Law Center argued in a letter appended to the application that Georgia’s constitution lets only the General Assembly waive sovereign immunity, and that the general-powers statutes the state relies on don’t do it. FHWA found the application complete anyway. Whether the waiver holds is a question that may not get answered until the first challenge to a GDOT-signed document.
Staffing, cost and the missing number
GDOT says it doesn’t need more people to do this. Its Office of Environmental Services has 83 staff and 70 embedded consultants, and the department plans just four new positions in a new NEPA Program Assignment Office. It typically keeps four general environmental consulting contracts funded at about $20 million to $25 million a year, against a four-year work program of roughly $28 billion.
What the application doesn’t contain is an estimate of time saved. It says assignment will speed delivery. It doesn’t say by how many months.
FHWA’s program page lists nine states with executed 327 agreements, from California and Texas to Maine and Nebraska. Georgia would be the tenth. For contractors and the engineering firms that write these documents, the practical change is one reviewer instead of two on jobs like the SR 400 Express Lanes, and it would arrive while Congress is still working against a Dec. 11 surface transportation deadline.
FHWA audits a newly assigned state every year for the first four years. That first audit, not the signing ceremony, is where Georgia finds out whether its reviews hold up.