In terms of time, money, and penalties, I think building infrastructure for the common good is actually *more* illegal than murder.
Yes, in principle there's a pathway to permitting anything you want. In practice, it requires either an Act of Congress or a gigantic bribe or both - but murderers get away with it every day.
It's because building anything at all is illegal. We have multiple canal systems built nearly a century ago that leak or can't run anywhere near capacity, because fixing them would (normatively) take two guys and a bulldozer but (descriptively) consume 10 years and billions of dollars of payoffs to a 100-turtle-deep layer of the usual suspects. We could easily desalinate another 10 million acre feet of water per year, but ... building anything at all is illegal.