But bureaucratic delays by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rate as the region's chief obstacle to development, according to the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

After a year's worth of complaints directed at the corps' top brass, change may be coming.

The Sacramento office - the second-busiest in the United States - is getting money to hire additional staff. The corps also is working to streamline processes so development applications don't linger.

Last month, Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River, convened a Washington summit with corps officials, developers and civic leaders from the Sacramento area that was widely recognized as the event that catapulted Sacramento's problems into a Washington issue.

As a result of that meeting, the corps on Sunday is dispatching to Sacramento its top regulatory chief, Mark Sudol, in an effort to speed issuance of permits that affect the pace and cost of everything from building and widening roads to huge housing developments and water and sewer expansions.

"I am really happy where this has gone," Lungren said. "But this is a marathon, not a sprint."

Environmentalists were largely unaware of the effort to reform corps processes. Those who were are skeptical, and expressed disappointment that they were not included in the Lungren meeting.

"I am not surprised," said Vicki Lee, conservation chair of the Mother Lode Chapter of the Sierra Club. "We've been trying to stop development."

Environmental lawyer Jim Paschl said he is concerned that the agency's plan "doesn't amount to an effective waiver of environmental requirements."

While most of the public focus on the corps in recent years has been on its work to better protect Sacramento from flooding, the Sacramento district office also is responsible for determining what wetlands are under federal jurisdiction and how development should fit around them.

The Sacramento region is laced with streams and rivers and dotted by seasonal collections of runoff called vernal pools.

The complicated wetlands issues and development pressure have put the Sacramento office behind only the Jacksonville, Fla., office, which issues permits for the entire state of Florida.

But the Jacksonville office has 100 people to process permits over an 80,000-square-mile area, said Jason Fanselau, spokesman for the Sacramento office. The Sacramento office, he said, has just 40 people to handle permitting over 350,000 square miles covering Central and Northern California, Nevada and parts of Utah and Colorado.

It's the workload from the Sacramento area that is swamping the district office. There is a backlog of about 600 permit applications - two-thirds from the six-county Sacramento area.

That backlog would take six months of work to eliminate, assuming no new applications arrive, said Mike Mahoney, chief of construction operations at the Sacramento office. As it is, new applications still outnumber completions, even though the office has started to "outsource" some of its work to other corps regions.

According to business leaders in the Sacramento delegation at the February meeting, problems at the Sacramento office go beyond staff shortages.

They say the office has a history of sitting on applications or requiring repeated and sometimes contradictory revisions. Some corps decisions are nonsensical, they say.

Lungren said that the corps' decisions on permits should be based not on whether its staff thinks the development should go forward, but rather on how development should be fitted around wetlands.

"It's as if the corps has been a local zoning authority," Lungren said. "That bothers me a great deal."

"It's a huge problem," agreed Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena. "There needs to be some balance and consistency in the process."

That view was echoed by Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, who attended the Lungren meeting with Bay Area Democratic Reps. George Miller, Anna Eshoo and Mike Honda.

"Nobody is asking the corps to let developers roll over them," Thompson said. "We're just trying to get everyone to put their adversarial hats on the rack."

Congress took a step toward addressing the office's staffing shortage by including an increase for regulatory processing for Sacramento and Jacksonville in a 2006 spending bill. But rather than the $2 million increase that the Sacramento office thought it might get, it was allotted $500,000, which will allow it to add two or three new people.

Corps officials at the Lungren summit recognized that the problem with the Sacramento office is more than money.

According to several who attended that meeting, including Lungren and Thompson, Brig. Gen. Joseph Schroedel, commander of the corps' South Pacific Division, which includes the Sacramento district, pledged to fix the "systemic problem."

Mahoney said some steps already have been taken.

He said the office is tracking applications much more closely, comparing the time it takes to process them against a national standard. Project managers now are given monthly assessments of their standing, and Lungren said congressional offices are provided monthly progress reports.

In addition, Lungren's staff is negotiating even stricter timetables under which applications that linger too long would automatically be moved to the top of the pile.

"When you have such intense development pressure, even small delays can cost lots of money," Sudol said.