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The Oregon Department of Transportation recently received kudos for permitting practices that have reportedly helped contractors avoid more than $73 million in costs.

The American Public Works Association has bestowed ODOT with its 2012 Technical and Management Innovation Award for the agency’s environmental programmatic permitting process. The process allowed ODOT to obtain hundreds of permits for the OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program – a $1.3 billion project to repair and replace hundreds of bridges across the state.

According to ODOT, the traditional permitting process on such a project would have taken as long as 50 years. Instead, the agency worked with 11 state and federal regulatory agencies to combine a handful of environmental statutes into a single set of standards.

Geoff Crook, an environmental program manager for the bridge program, said the programmatic permitting process was one of the agencies most innovative solutions. Crook accepted the award this month on ODOT’s behalf at the APWA 2012 International Public Works Congress & Exposition in Anaheim, Calif.