The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) needed their guidelines for preparing waterway and environmental permits organized efficiently to improve the permitting process. In addition, guidelines for preparing earth disturbance and waterway permits were either absent or not easily found. This resulted in inconsistent permit applications, technical deficiency letters from permitting agencies, and missed project schedules.

RETTEW’s extensive permitting expertise and our collaborative relationships with regulatory agencies, such as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, led PennDOT to ask us to develop a user-friendly manual that organized this information into one place. Our environmental staff identified issues and concerns in the permitting process and developed guidelines and procedures for preparing permits, as well as QA/QC checklists. This publication is the first to comprehensively address environmental permitting, and provides a background, overview, and understanding of earth disturbance and waterway permits that will improve the overall quality of environmental permit submissions.