By CNPS Public Affairs and Conservation Programs
California’s environmental bill of rights is in the news, and not in a good way. Chances are strong, you’ve seen the narrative: the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)—and/or the abuse of it—is to blame for California’s housing crisis and the overall slow pace of progress in the state.
As CNPS has said before, we believe this assertion is a misdiagnosis of a larger, more complex societal and economic problem. Now, under rightful pressure to address California’s very real housing crisis, California’s leaders are chasing a single-path solution on affordable housing while undercutting the most important way Californians can protect their communities and the natural world around them from harmful effects of development.
Here’s a recap of our analysis and how to take action now.
Fact from fiction
CEQA is a public disclosure law that requires projects to make known any negative effects the project will have on the environment. Despite common assertions that CEQA has barred the development of a wide range of projects, CEQA is largely used to disclose impacts and often to improve projects, not to stop them outright. Very few CEQA projects are litigated, less than 2%, and less than a quarter of these lawsuits are related to housing projects. (See this Rose Foundation Report for more details.)
Room for improvement
CEQA can be expensive, creating an added cost to housing developments. CNPS maintains that exemptions from full CEQA review are appropriate for certain types of development in certain areas, such as urban infill housing developments on lands that do not contain habitat for threatened, endangered, or California Rare Plant Ranked species. This year, Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) introduced Senate Bill 607 to streamline the approval of infill housing projects, a goal that many environmentalists support. Hhowever, this bill went far beyond exempting infill housing from the CEQA process by proposing to remove the fair argument standard from CEQA (meaning that if there is a fair argument that there could be significant impacts from a project that an EIR must be prepared), creating additional exemptions, limiting the scope of Environmental Impact Reports, and limiting the scope of documents admissible in the administrative record across a wide range of types of projects, including industrial facilities and fuel reduction projects. It was a full-blown attack on CEQA that would weaken environmental protections—a proposal out of sync with public sentiment.
A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found that the majority of people in California believe that stricter environmental regulations are worth the potential costs.
The bill’s authors removed some of the worst portions of SB 607—but not all — as it transitioned into a trailer bill behind closed doors as part of the budget approval process. Though it passed in June, many legislators raised concerns about the need to amend it and the process by which it advanced. In particular, we’d like to thank Assemblymember Gregg Hart for being the only Democrat to oppose the bill, and Republican Senator Roger Neillo for calling out the undemocratic way the bill advanced.
The most concerning parts of the AB/SB131 are the CEQA exemptions for a “facility for advanced manufacturing” and the poor definition of “natural and protected lands.” CNPS and partners across the state are advocating for a new bill to revise two crucial elements of SB 131’s current language:
- Remove the “advanced manufacturing” exemption, and
- Amend “natural and protected lands” to include habitat for species protected under the state and federal endangered species acts, the Native Plant Protection Act, and for species with a California Rare Plant Rank.
Without these changes environmentally harmful industrial facilities could be developed without environmental review. Various projects could impact California’s most imperiled biodiversity without any knowledge of what was lost. Given the limited distribution of many of California’s rare plant species, even exemptions of small projects could have consequential impacts.
A narrow window of opportunity
Please take 5 minutes to ask your legislator to commit to these critical amendments to AB/SB 13. Here’s how:
- Call your state assemblymember and state senator. Their contact information can be found at https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov.
- Call the Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas, at (916) 319-2029.
- Call the Senate President Pro Tempore, Mike McGuire, at (916) 651-4002.
Learn more and take action with others
Please join the CNPS Advocacy Corps on Tuesday, August 5 at 6 pm for an educational and interactive webinar with guest speakers Rachel Hooper and Gabriel Tolson from the CEQA Works coalition. Register here.
The post Take a Stand for CEQA . . . Before It’s Too Late appeared first on California Native Plant Society.
