Goodyear is building; D.C. keeps getting in the way

Brannon Hampton

Submitted photo/City of Goodyear

Sen. Ruben Gallego’s energy plan … protects workers and prevailing wages, offers a path forward for communities built around older energy jobs and treats permitting backlog as the cost driver it is. It cuts red tape and lets us build.”

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OPINION — Goodyear is one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Every month we approve homes, break ground on employment sites and work to keep power and water ahead of demand.

Residents don’t experience infrastructure as policy. They experience it as a utility bill, a commute or a job offer that shows up or doesn’t. Too often, what stands between a project and a payoff isn’t the city council. It’s Washington, D.C.

When an energy project or transmission line dies in federal review, it’s reported as an environmental victory. In Goodyear, it reads differently: a year of construction work that never came, a home that never got built, a bill that keeps climbing.

That process was built to stop things, and decades ago it worked, when the threat was an unregulated smokestack next to a school. But the project today is more likely a transmission line carrying solar power to West Valley homes and employers. A federal review averaging 4 1/2 years doesn’t know the difference. Nationally, about 2,600 gigawatts of generation sit in line waiting to connect, more than the entire grid we operate today, and most of it clean.

That isn’t protection. It’s paralysis, and ratepayers pay for it.

Sen. Ruben Gallego’s energy plan takes the problem seriously. It protects workers and prevailing wages, offers a path forward for communities built around older energy jobs and treats permitting backlog as the cost driver it is. It cuts red tape and lets us build.

Congress is expected to take up permitting legislation in the coming months. Arizona is fortunate to have Sen. Gallego on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for that fight. He treats permitting delay as a problem to solve, not a virtue to defend.

Cities like ours don’t have the luxury of waiting. The growth is already here. We can keep obstructing, or we can build. Goodyear is ready.

Vice Mayor Brannon Hampton has served on the Goodyear City Council since 2017. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.