2.3.4. Mitigation and Monitoring

It is the Federal Highway Administration’s policy to:

 

• Avoid, minimize, and mitigate to the fullest extent possible the adverse effects of transportation programs and projects on the neighborhood, community, and natural resources.
  
• Seek opportunities to go beyond the traditional project mitigation efforts and implement innovative enhancement measures to help the project fit harmoniously within the community and natural environs.
  
• Participate, to the fullest extent permitted by law, in funding mitigation and enhancement activities required by Federal, State, and local statutes and regulations for project related impacts to the natural environment, neighborhoods, and communities.

As CSS becomes part of the way state DOTs do business, many agencies seek ways to gauge their performance.  Performance measurement is a management tool that many DOTs are already using to help achieve a variety of strategic goals and objectives.

 

Context-Sensitive Solutions often appear deceptively simple, yet the holistic, multi-disciplinary, community-driven nature of CSS-based project delivery makes measurement challenging.

 

CSS touches many parts of project development and every project is different. The tools that make CSS successful include, but are not limited to, top-level leadership and commitment, agency-wide training, adoption of CSS in formal guidance and manuals, early and continuous, two-way dialogue with the general public and interest groups, interaction among multiple professional disciplines, and effective consideration of alternatives.