How does anything get done in America any more?

It’s a mystery, at least if the case of Tower’s long-awaited harbor project is any indication. In the overall scheme of things, it’s a small potatoes project, involving a bridge replacement, several hundred yards of highway reroute and an acre or two of dredging to re-establish a historic harbor on Tower’s west end. The payoff from the project, in terms of new private investment and economic development, is potentially significant, but the environmental effects are minor.

It is a project with plenty of local support, and financial help from Washington (thanks to Congressman Oberstar) as well as local legislators, who dedicated just over $3 million in taconite tax funding towards the project. They all turned out for a celebratory groundbreaking way back in 2007, and work was slated to begin the next year.

Then the bureaucrats took over, and the project that many had hoped would spark a recovery to the Tower area economy became another sorry example of the kind of bureaucratic constipation that hampers almost far too many small projects these days.

As we reported last summer, the project’s environmental analysis was held captive by federal bureaucrats for months last year over the potential impact of the planned removal of a little used boat ramp along the East Two River.

Now, it’s the turn of state bureaucrats with the Department of Transportation, who announced this past week that they have imposed another delay in the permitting process. As they explained it, the delay was necessary because Christmas and New Years were celebrated this year and many of the bureaucrats who would engage in the ritualistic paper-pushing went on vacation, which prevented them from meeting to mull over the city’s permit request on a timely basis.

We certainly understand the need for environmental review— and we expect that review of large-scale projects will, by necessity, take time. But when a minor project like Tower’s harbor restoration involves five years of bureaucratic dithering, the review process is badly broken.

A dysfunctional review process could be dismissed as job security for the bureaucrats involved, but it has real world consequences for those proposing such projects. For the city of Tower, the delay has already meant the loss of $100,000 in related business park funding and the potential loss of $1.1 million in direct project funding which is set to expire soon. The loss of those dollars would be a major blow to the project.

The latest delay is also likely to raise the cost of construction for the city. Had the road and bridge work been bid in January as was hoped, the city would likely have found plenty of contractors eager to line up their summer’s work. Now, bids likely won’t be let before June. By that time, most contractors have their construction season booked, or nearly so. That means fewer bidders, and higher prices.

It also means work likely won’t start until late summer or fall, which blows most of another construction season.

Is this really how we want to undertake economic development in America? Tie up every project, no matter how small, in miles of paperwork?

It’s no wonder that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been slow to generate new jobs. It’s hard to spend money on infrastructure, when even the smallest project takes years to reach the permit stage. When they say “shovel-ready,” they mean you’re going to need a shovel just to clear away the blizzard of paper the bureaucrats will unleash.

As Congressman Jim Oberstar has complained, even a simple highway mill overlay now takes three years to pass through the bureaucratic gut. A mill overlay, for those unfamiliar with the term, involves grinding off the top couple inches of highway pavement, reheating and remixing the bituminous and reapplying the same. Other than smoother driving, the environmental impact of such a project should be nearly undetectable. But that won’t stop an army of bureaucrats from fussing over the most minor of details, for years.

It’s time for some common sense. Wasting hundreds of man-hours reviewing projects with little or no impact costs both the federal and state government money they don’t have, and undermines legitimate projects that can create jobs we desperately need. If Congress and the Obama administration want to spur job creation, revamping the environmental review process to expedite smaller projects, would be a good place to start.