Wintergreen Emergency Egress Act

This section gives the Act its short title, the Wintergreen Emergency Egress Act. It does not create any requirement on its own.

This section would amend section 2 of the Act of June 30, 1936 (16 U.S.C. 460a-3), the law that covers the Secretary of the Interior's authority to issue rights-of-way on Blue Ridge Parkway land. It restructures the existing sentence granting that authority into a two-part list, keeping the Secretary's existing discretionary authority to issue rights-of-way as the first item without changing what that authority covers. It then adds a new, mandatory second item: the Secretary of the Interior would have to issue the right-of-way shown as "Proposed Egress" on the map titled "Blue Ridge Parkway, Proposed Wintergreen Emergency Egress Near Milepost 9.6" (numbered 601/194,694 and dated September 2024), but only after the Secretary certifies all three of the following: that an evaluation has been completed of alternatives to this right-of-way that would not cross federal land, including evaluating whether existing trails could be converted to roads; that an analysis of expected fire ecology behavior in a fire emergency has been completed with respect to the right-of-way; and that any required reviews for the right-of-way have been completed under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.) and under division A of subtitle III of title 54 of the United States Code.