Welcome
If you are reading this, you are one of the first people to see SWCA’s Regulatory Radar. Thank you for being here early. This issue is different from what you will typically receive. Instead of covering a specific regulatory development, it introduces the product itself: what it is, who is behind it, and what you can expect going forward.
What SWCA’s Regulatory Radar Is
Regulatory Radar is a subscription intelligence service that tracks the federal and state regulatory developments most likely to affect infrastructure permitting, environmental review, and energy project development. Each issue focuses on one regulatory action, final rule, piece of legislation, court decision, or agency directive, and explains what happened, why it matters, and what to do about it.
Regulatory Radar is built for three audiences: project developers and infrastructure clients who need to know what is coming before it shows up in a permit condition, legal teams who need field-level context to turn a regulatory update into client advice, and project finance and investment professionals who need a fast, credible read on regulatory risk.
Who Writes It
Regulatory Radar is written by SWCA Environmental Consultants’ policy team and subject matter experts across the firm’s practice areas including biological resources, cultural resources, air quality, water resources, and energy permitting specialists who are actively working these regulatory frameworks on real projects. Before anything publishes, every issue goes through a structured review process: a factual accuracy check by a subject matter expert in the relevant field and a final editorial pass. Nothing goes out that has not been checked by someone who actually knows the subject.
Why We Built This
Most regulatory information available today falls into one of two categories. Industry newsletters and Federal Register alerts tell you what changed but stop there. Law firm client alerts explain what a rule requires but rarely explain what it looks like once it reaches an actual project. Neither answers the question that matters most to the people we work with every day: what does this mean for a project that is sitting in permitting right now.
SWCA has spent decades in the rooms where that question gets answered, in pre-application meetings, biological assessments, environmental impact statements, and agency consultations across the country. Regulatory Radar exists to put that experience into a format subscribers can act on, before a regulatory shift becomes a surprise.
What You Will Get
Every issue follows the same structure so you always know where to find what you need. A headline and executive summary give you the essential facts in under a minute. A detailed section walks through exactly what happened, with specific dates, citations, and figures you can verify. A section explains why it matters for your work specifically. And then comes the part we think you will find nowhere else: the SWCA Lens.
The SWCA Lens
The SWCA Lens is our practitioners writing in their own voice about what a regulatory development actually looks like in the field, what they are seeing on active projects, what has changed in agency conversations, and what clients are asking about. It is not a summary restated in first person. It is not a sales pitch. It is the closest thing to sitting across the table from someone who does this work every day and asking them what they really think.
Every issue closes with specific, actionable guidance on what to watch and what to do next, tied to real dates and real decision points, not vague generalities.
Getting Started
Regulatory Radar publishes when a regulatory development warrants coverage, not on a fixed schedule, because the timeliness of the information is the point. For major developments, you can expect coverage within a two or three days of the event. You will also see a small number of digest-style issues that summarize the broader regulatory landscape between individual development memos.
We would rather earn your attention with substance than ask for it with noise. If an issue is not useful to you, tell us. If a topic is missing that should be covered, tell us that too. This is a new product and your feedback in these early weeks will shape what it becomes.
Thank you for subscribing early. We are glad you are here.
