SALT LAKE CITY — The head of the Utah Department of Transportation sat down with President Donald Trump on Friday to talk about ways to streamline the federal process for new road projects.

"He was very engaging. He stopped me many times, let's say three or four times, for questions. It was a back-and-forth discussion. He definitely builds things. I could tell that. He was focused on trying to get things quickly to market," said Carlos Braceras, UDOT's executive director.

Braceras was among several state transportation officials who met privately with Trump, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke at the end of what the White House dubbed "infrastructure week." Braceras spent about 90 minutes with the two secretaries and another 40 minutes with the president.

"Utah has a voice at the table more so than I've seen before," Braceras said in a conference call from Washington with Utah reporters.

Trump wrapped the week with a speech at the U.S. Department of Transportation promising to streamline the federal approval process for building roads, bridges, rails, pipelines and tunnels.

"We are here today to focus on solving one of the biggest obstacles to creating this new and desperately needed infrastructure — and that is the painfully slow, costly and time-consuming process for getting permits and approvals to build," he said. "It is a long, slow, unnecessarily burdensome process."

Braceras said he focused his attention on the need to streamline and align federal regulations so states can get road projects done more efficiently and less expensively.

He told Trump about a long-proposed road passing through a desert tortoise preserve in Washington County to alleviate congestion in St. George. The preserve was created in 1995 and Congress passed a bill sponsored by the late Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, in 2008 directing the Bureau of Land Management to identify a transportation corridor in the area.

"The BLM has yet to do that," Braceras said.

In his speech, Trump said state and local governments know best how to plan their communities, analyze projects and protect the environment. He told states and local leaders, “Help is finally, after many, many decades, on its way,” vowing to give control back to the cities and the states.

Braceras called Trump solution oriented. "Time is money to him," he said.

The UDOT boss said the Federal Highway Administration wants to get highway projects through the process but has to work with other federal agencies that have their own regulations and missions. He said he impressed on the president the need for an "escalation ladder" for taking decisions higher up when agencies can't agree and for an environmental document that would satisfy the various interests.

Braceras mentioned four projects — UDOT spokesman John Gleason later identified them as West Davis Corridor, Legacy Parkway, Mountain View Corridor and I-15 reconstruction in Utah County — that over 26 years cost $66 million in environmental studies.

"We are not looking to shortchange any environmental process. I believe we feel more strongly about protecting our environment than folks in Washington, D.C., probably," Braceras said.

Trump said in his speech, for which Braceras had a second-row seat, his administration is forming a new office within the Council of Environmental Quality that would “root out inefficiency, clarify lines of authority and streamline federal and state, local procedures so that communities can modernize their aging infrastructure without fear of outdated federal rules getting in the way."