In February, after one more court docket resolution stalling sorely wanted housing improvement, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared that California’s landmark environmental legislation is “damaged.”
The California Environmental High quality Act, often known as CEQA, is meant to guard the atmosphere by requiring governments to review and mitigate any harms of improvement earlier than they approve it. However as Newsom famous, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “rich owners” (amongst others) to dam housing — usually within the city and suburban areas the place folks have the least environmental impression.
And housing isn’t all that’s on the road. To satisfy the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and safe its share of federal green-energy funding — California must rapidly approve wind and photo voltaic vitality initiatives, electrical energy transmission traces, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that finish, in Could, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure bundle to “assert a special paradigm.” Not would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and course of.” Going ahead, the state would commit itself to “outcomes.”
Newsom’s daring rhetoric implied that large reforms had been within the offing. However the bundle included solely two incremental CEQA reforms, neither directed at housing.
One permits the governor to designate extra “environmental management” initiatives for which the courts are speculated to wrap up any authorized challenges inside 270 days. If a case takes longer to resolve and stays caught in authorized limbo, nonetheless, the governor’s invoice gives no authorized treatment.
The opposite measure seeks to slender the “administrative report” in CEQA circumstances. Typically, compiling the executive report — all the data concerned in an environmental assessment that was accessible to the federal government and is germane to the court docket case — can lead to intensive delays as a result of it takes a very long time to assemble all of the required paperwork.
Newsom proposed to mitigate this drawback by excluding from the executive report “inner communications” inside an company that aren’t offered to the ultimate decision-makers. This was a child step.
In sum, Newsom’s large push to reform a “damaged” legislation gained him a statutory proper to implore judges to hurry up just a few extra circumstances — and little else.
If you wish to see what actual reform seems to be like, look north. Washington state legislators voted overwhelmingly this 12 months to get rid of environmental assessment for each city housing mission that conforms to a metropolis’s common plan and zoning legal guidelines. Deep-green Oregon, in the meantime, by no means noticed the necessity for a CEQA-like legislation. It adopted city progress boundaries as a substitute, preserving the countryside whereas permitting cities to approve new housing with out the “paralysis” Newsom bemoaned.
Oregon and Washington, in different phrases, selected outcomes.
Oddly, amid all of the Sturm und Drang occasioned by the governor’s infrastructure bundle, Newsom has shunned utilizing his regulatory authority over CEQA. The legislation says the Governor’s Workplace of Planning and Analysis and the state Pure Assets Company might refine and make clear CEQA’s often-vague necessities by issuing “pointers.” New pointers might bolster exemptions for city and suburban housing, make new exemptions for electrical energy transmission or create a statewide environmental zoning map and calibrate the depth of evaluations in keeping with the sensitivity of a given zone.
Sure, Crew Paralysis would throw conniptions and file lawsuits. And lots of moons in the past, a court docket did strike down an effort to streamline CEQA by the rules. However the California Supreme Court docket later disapproved of that call.
The sector belongs to the governor. If nothing else, an overhaul of the rules would set the agenda for the Legislature and the courts. If CEQA is really damaged, it’s certainly price taking some authorized and political dangers to repair it.
Chris Elmendorf is a professor of legislation on the UC Davis College of Legislation. ©2023 Los Angeles Instances. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
