POLICY New federal environmental-review rules take effect today. U.S. DOT’s highway, transit, and rail administrations published a final rule on Sept. 1 that finalizes the interim rules they issued July 3, 2025, effective on publication. It strips out the cross-references to the Council on Environmental Quality regulations that were rescinded last year, and it replaces the old “direct, indirect, and cumulative effects” language with the statute’s “reasonably foreseeable” standard, citing the Supreme Court’s Seven County decision that NEPA is procedural. The categorical exclusion for projects receiving limited federal assistance moves from $5 million to $6 million and from $30 million to $35 million. Certification on a draft environmental impact statement is gone; certification is now required only at the end of the process, on a final statement or a combined final statement and record of decision. The rule governs environmental documents accepted or prepared after July 3, 2025, under docket FHWA-2025-0007.
Source: Federal Register, Sept. 1
BIZ The federal small-business ceiling for engineering services would rise from $25.5 million to $252 million. The Small Business Administration published two linked proposed rules on Aug. 20 that rewrite how size standards are calculated and then reset them across 338 industry groups, replacing 1,000 six-digit NAICS standards with 4- and 5-digit ones and eliminating the existing exceptions. Architectural services would go from $12.5 million to $135 million. No standard would fall. SBA estimates 114,541 firms would newly qualify as small. Of those, 37,002 already hold federal contracts, together worth $71 billion in fiscal 2025. Engineering services is the largest single group gaining the status, at 5,314 firms. The revised methodology drops the agency’s seven-factor analysis for a three-part measure of average market size, and it defaults to employee-based standards where SBA has discretion. Comments close Sept. 21 under RIN 3245-AI67, docket SBA-2026-0199.
POLICY A federal judge ruled against the state licensing board in a fight over the title “professional engineer.” U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ruled on Aug. 19 for Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, in his First Amendment suit against the Minnesota Board of Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design. The board censured and reprimanded Marohn in a June 27, 2022 final order and imposed a $1,500 civil penalty, finding that he represented himself as a licensed professional engineer between July 2018 and June 2020 while his license had lapsed, and that he denied having done so on a renewal application. Marohn first sued the board in federal court in 2021, and U.S. District Judge John Tunheim dismissed that case under the Younger abstention doctrine while the board’s contested case was still running at the Office of Administrative Hearings. The suit Judge Brasel decided came after that. Marohn writes that the court held the board’s authority reaches the practice of engineering and not an engineer’s participation in public policy debate. The case leaves open how far title protection extends when no plans are signed and no engineering work is performed.
Sources: AELSLAGID final order, June 27, 2022; Charles Marohn, Strong Towns, Aug. 31
FUNDING MnDOT opened its largest round of electric-vehicle charging money. The department made $41.2 million available on Sept. 1 under the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, its third round and its biggest, weighted toward Greater Minnesota. Applications are due Nov. 2. Federal money covers 80 percent of a project and the grantee carries 20 percent, and awards go to the private and public partners that will own and operate the stations. Round three covers 74 eligible clusters with up to 40 awards and no more than one award per cluster, and conditional awards are expected between late December and January. MnDOT has supported 24 fast-charging sites to date, 8 of them built with NEVI money and now running. Electric vehicles registered in the state went from 9,000 in 2018 to 90,000.
Sources: MnDOT, Sept. 1; MnDOT NEVI program page
ENG Enbridge halted construction on its $1 billion Line 5 reroute in northern Wisconsin. The company stopped work on Aug. 31, four days after Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Secretary Karen Hyun wrote asking it to “halt work on the pipeline re-routing project” until the release on the existing line is resolved. A parked, unoccupied semi delivering equipment rolled into an excavation on Aug. 25 and struck a bypass valve crews were installing. That released 31,000 barrels of natural gas liquids, which vaporized and dispersed, with 2,000 barrels still in the excavation as of Aug. 29. The 41-mile reroute is designed to carry the line off Bad River Band reservation land.
Source: Engineering News-Record, Aug. 31
ENG A back-analysis of 20 instrumented load tests produced new shaft-resistance factors for large-diameter bored piles. Researchers at the Shibaura Institute of Technology and the Asian Institute of Technology used strain-gauge data from static load tests on wet-process bored piles, 1.2 to 1.5 meters in diameter and 9.3 to 36 meters long, to back-calculate shaft resistance layer by layer. Across 32 clay layers the adhesion factor fell from 1.04 to 0.11 as normalized undrained shear strength rose, scaling with its inverse square root. Across 10 sand layers the friction factor ran from 0.45 to 1.06, and unit shaft resistance fit an interface friction angle of 0.85 times the internal friction angle. The part that matters for design is the treatment of intermediate geomaterials, the transitional ground between soil and weak rock. The authors put the practical transition from IGM clay to weak-rock behavior at a normalized strength near 10, and they find IGM sands track ordinary dense sands closely enough that a separate formulation may not be needed. They also warn against picking one adhesion correlation across the whole strength range. The tests come from a 180-kilometer alignment in northeastern Thailand over siltstone and sandstone.
Source: Results in Engineering, vol. 32 (2026), article 112199
BIZ JE Dunn stood up a power generation business unit. The contractor announced the unit on Aug. 31 inside its advanced technology group and named Ryan Wilson, who joined the firm in 2018 as a project engineer, as vice president and market lead. The firm points to artificial-intelligence infrastructure demand and aging power systems as the drivers, and it counts 220 completed power projects across generation types.
Source: Construction Dive, Aug. 31
MnDOT · road weather management TSMO tactical plan, prequalified consultants · due Sept. 22 · Notice
Three Rivers Park District · five-year planning, design, and engineering consultant pool · due Sept. 15 · RFQ
City of Luverne · airport master plan, planning consultants · due Sept. 15 · RFQ
Entries are open for ACEC Minnesota’s 60th annual Engineering Excellence Awards, with winners honored at the February 18, 2027 gala and advancing to the national ACEC competition, and the four-session Emerging Leaders program for early-career staff runs this October and November. Get your projects in!
The (Almost) Daily Brief publishes most weekdays: policy, funding, workforce, and industry news for Minnesota’s engineering firms, in a few minutes of reading.