Brown questions support in the Legislature

by Brian Leubitz

Speaking to reporters in China, Gov. Brown made it clear that he didn’t think CEQA reform was going to happen this year:

The California Environmental Quality Act, Brown told reporters here, “is supported by some key groups within the Democratic Party, and I think it would be difficult for the Legislature to move that process forward.”

Brown said he remains committed relaxing provisions of the law but that he has a large agenda, including the state budget, water infrastructure and high-speed rail. He said “the appetite for CEQA reform is much stronger outside the state Capitol than it is inside.”

Brown said, “This is not something you get done in a year, but I believe before I depart this stage we will see reform in CEQA.”(SacBee)

Supporting his initial statement that Democrats support CEQA is the fact that the CDP passed a resolution supporting CEQA reform only so far as it maintains the basic environmental protections that are at its heart. Here is the relevant clause:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the California Democratic Party stands with the labor and environmental community in affirming its support and commitment to CEQA’s original intent to ensure public participation and transparency in the planning process in order to protect California’s environment and calls on the state legislature and governor to oppose any efforts to weaken this law or reduce public participation (CDP PDF)

Look, while Dan Walters thinks that it is just the liberals trying to stop Jerry’s vision of CEQA, there is a lot more to it. The resolution clearly does not say that CEQA shouldn’t be reformed. Even many environmentalists agree with the statement that some reform could make the law better. But the reforms need to be extremely careful to not toss out the very valuable protections that CEQA offers while dumping some of the excess red tape.

Perhaps CEQA reform doesn’t get done this year, but with legislation that is as critical as CEQA, maybe we shouldn’t be rushing it. Let’s make sure we don’t look back at these changes with regret for our environment. We already have enough environmental challenges without creating more for ourselves.

San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener looks to tweak local CEQA regulations

by Brian Leubitz

You may have noticed a thing or two about the question of “reforming” the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA has been used to hold up projects both good and bad for the environment and the community. Some tweaks would help expedite good projects, but the heart and soul of the legislation is important for the long term environmental future of the state. But one of the issues that is less clear is the role of local regulations on CEQA appeals.

It won’t surprise you to learn that San Francisco has some of the most confounding permit regulations. I learned just how confounding when a neighbor, who had already received a permit had to change a small aspect of some renovations. The process is something of a mess, to say the least, and can end up with some very high costs to get a simple project completed. However, Supervisor Scott Wiener, is looking to maintain the important role of environmental review, while trying to make repairs and renovations easier on homeowners in SF.

Under his proposal, which goes to the board’s Land Use Committee on Monday, appeals would need to be made within 30 days of a project’s initial approval. His measure also would enhance the system for notifying neighbors and other affected parties.

In doing so, the measure would end the ambiguity that allows environmental appeals of previously approved projects whenever any subsequent permit is pulled – even if the work is minor and does not affect the scope, look or nature of a project.(SF Chronicle)

Now, I’m sure the law proposed will go through some modifications before it becomes law, but this kind of expediting local environmental review while preserving the core goals is just as important, if not more important, for your average homeowner. It will likely directly impact more Californians than some of the proposals bandied about in the legislature these days. We need to keep a close eye on these type of changes, but if done right, they can be positive for the community as some of these small project holdups are what give CEQA a bad name. We need CEQA as a tool to fight bad and environmentally reckless development, and maybe some of these small tweaks can stabilize CEQA’s role for the long-term.

Photo credit: SF Supervisor Scott Wiener at 17th Street Plaza opening by Jamison Wieser, on Flickr

Alliance will defend landmark California Environmental Quality Act

by Brian Leubitz

There is a lot of discussion going on around how CEQA will be reformed in this legislative session. Gov. Brown has called for major changes in the legislation, and it has been weakened by a series of one-off exemptions for major projects passed through the legislature.  However, a new organization, CEQAWorks, has been formed to maintain the integrity of CEQA’s mission to protect California’s environment and natural resources.

Take a look at the “Who We Are” page on their website and you see quite the interesting mix. Sierra Club California and the State Building Trades Council. California Trout and UFCW Western States Council. It’s an interesting list, and a coalition that should carry considerable weight in the process.

The group claims a number of goals for any proposed reforms:

We are committed to positive updates to the California Environmental Quality Act that maintain its core principles:

• Transparency CEQA must continue to require public disclosure of the project, its potential environmental impacts and consideration of reasonable alternatives.

• Mitigation CEQA must continue to require mitigation of all significant effects on the environment to the extent feasible.

• Comprehensive protection. CEQA must apply to all significant impacts on the environment, including cumulative impacts, and provide a safety net to cover holes in the existing regulatory structure.

• Public participation CEQA must continue to require public participation in the review of environmental issues, including requiring a written response to public comments.

• Community enforcement CEQA must continue to provide the public with the right to sue to enforce its protections, a key tool to protect communities, particularly those in disadvantaged areas.

CEQA has gotten a lot of bad press over the last few years, especially with regards to transit and affordable housing projects. And certainly there are cases of abuse. However, CEQAWorks puts the issue in context:

But environmentalists argue that claims of delays are exaggerated. Less than 1% of all projects in the state face CEQA lawsuits, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Nevertheless, Reznik said the new group will offer its own proposals to update CEQA, including increased electronic record-keeping. “I think there is a recognition that things can be improved in CEQA,” he said. “We’re not just the group of no.” (LATimes)

Given the increasingly likely odds of some changes to CEQA, engagement by a broad swath of organizations like this one, could bode well for a more open process.

A broken environmental review system means change is coming – progressives should articulate their vision before one is imposed on them

As Brian explained yesterday a last-minute end of session gut and amend effort to change the California Environmental Quality Act will not move forward. But that doesn’t mean the effort to reform CEQA has come to an end, nor does it mean that the broken system of environmental review can be left to continue to rot. The same coalition that came together this month to push reforms will merely redouble their efforts ahead of a 2013 push to change CEQA. They’ve got the money and the momentum. I would not bet against them.

Many progressive groups across the state mobilized to block this specific reform proposal, charging that it would in fact carve out a series of loopholes to existing laws and help environmentally unfriendly things like offshore oil rigs avoid CEQA review.

These charges are very serious, and if true would indeed mean this proposal wasn’t the right way to reform CEQA. Surely it is the case, as the LA Times argued, that reforms of this importance should be carefully deliberated and not rushed. I agree with that assessment, and shoehorning this into the very end of a legislative session was not a confidence-building move.

But reform is still needed, and progressives would do well to get out in front by proposing a better way to not only review projects, but to ensure that state and regional planning is done in a way that meets 21st century needs of environmental protection and reducing carbon emissions. Unless progressives actively propose an alternative, however, I fear they will get steamrolled. In this post I explore some reasons for reform and what a progressive solution could look like.

The case for reform remains strong. CEQA reform is going to happen. Its backers have the money, and they have the momentum. They can point to any number of truly egregious examples of wanton CEQA abuse to make their case for them. One is the man who stalled the San Francisco Bike Master Plan for four years with a CEQA suit, on the charge that giving bikes more space on the roads would hurt the environment by causing traffic.

High speed rail advocates have seen CEQA used to delay the environmentally and climate friendly project, with well-heeled Peninsula NIMBYs filing lawsuits under CEQA they keep losing, aside from technical fixes that the project was easily able to make. CEQA has even been used to try and overturn a marijuana dispensary ban (and while I oppose such bans, I also don’t see this as a legitimate use of that law). It’s ridiculous things like that which make a mockery of the law and are simply not affordable in an era of climate crisis.

On the other hand, environmentalists have also pointed to a number of examples that showed how CEQA legitimately stopped environmentally damaging projects that other laws would have allowed. One friend described to me yesterday a pollution-spewing project that was permitted under loopholes in existing laws, only to be stopped by a CEQA suit.

My response was that showed the need for reforming not just CEQA, but California’s whole approach to environmental regulation. A new system is needed, because this one is broken. It doesn’t make sense that one should have to go to court to stop an oil refinery but that someone can use environmental law to stop an electrified passenger train that massively reduces carbon emissions. Something isn’t right here.

Others have reached similar conclusions. In 2006, SPUR issued a report titled Fixing the California Environmental Quality Act. They argued that CEQA has failed to meet its objectives, has actually made environmental problems worse, and that it should be replaced in urban and suburban settings with a statewide planning process:

In the absence of strong statewide planning and in the presence of weak local planning, stopping projects is what California does best. CEQA has become the tool of choice for stopping bad ones and good ones. SPUR has reviewed CEQA from the standpoint of sound planning and environmental quality. We contend that after the law’s 30-plus years of operation, the type and pattern of developments, viewed at citywide, regional, and state scales, are environmentally worse than before. Not all of this can be blamed on CEQA; it has improved individual project design in some cases. Yet viewed broadly, CEQA has contributed to sprawl and worsened the housing shortage by inhibiting dense infill development far more than local planning and zoning would have done alone. To re-form California, we must first reform CEQA….

Our neighbors to the north provide a dramatic model for change. At almost the same moment that California turned to environmental impact reports to protect its environment, Oregon turned to a strengthened planning program, requiring effective local plans and zoning by all jurisdictions. Oregon has protected and greatly improved its natural environment without review of individual projects, but with sound intergovernmental planning. The recent property-rights crusade that passed compensatory zoning at the Oregon ballot box does not lessen the fact that the Oregon environment remains one of the most pristine in the country.

California ought to be moving toward a system where we have statewide land use plans that have regional and even city specificity, emphasizing environmentally friendly projects and mandating carbon emissions reductions. That’s the goal of SB 375, and the basis of a lawsuit by Attorney General Kamala Harris against the San Diego Association of Governments plan which did not meet the state’s greenhouse gas reduction targets and instead favored sprawl. Governor Jerry Brown is very interested in these kinds of modernized plans and that’s good. Harmonizing CEQA with those kinds of state and local plans is smart – as long as those plans are modernized and up to date.

More fundamentally, the current CEQA process is not one that encourages thoughtful design or encourages democratic participation. CEQA relies on lawsuits as its primary enforcement mechanism. But many people in communities affected by the worst environmental impacts don’t have the money to go to court. The existing planning process is often described as “decide-announce-defend” where a government agency or private developer decides to do something, announces it, and then holds public meetings to defend it. A more inclusive process, one that would address environmental and social justice concerns, would still have the courts as a pathway but could rely on more democratic processes of engagement to develop regional general plans that meet statewide carbon reduction requirements and environmental rules. Of course, the details of how that might work matter a lot.

Further, CEQA is inherently biased in favor of the status quo. An existing oil refinery or a freeway doesn’t have to face the CEQA process, but a new wind farm or an electric passenger rail system does, making it harder and more costly to replace the polluting infrastructure with clean infrastructure. There’s got to be a better way – CEQA should help address climate change and clean up the skies, the waters, and the neighborhoods, not make it harder to do that.

Good reforms won’t create new loopholes or allow polluters to escape their responsibilities. Good reforms would preserve the key pieces of CEQA, including court enforcement, while also bringing it in line with laws like AB 32 and SB 375. It would favor green, carbon reducing projects while still holding them to environmental standards. It would not be something that people could abuse for purposes that aren’t related to protecting the environment or reducing carbon emissions.

As I’ve argued before, it won’t work to try and maintain the current status quo. CEQA does need reform and that the status quo isn’t acceptable. I wouldn’t want to see CA progressives wind up in a place of defending the current process from any kind of change.

Without reform, the legislature will keep finding ways to give projects whose backers are politically connected CEQA exemptions or expedited reviews. Farmers Field in LA got a bill passed to expedite their CEQA review thanks in part to those connections. I’m not convinced that’s the best way to reform CEQA, but we will see more of it in the absence of lasting fixes.

We need to close the loopholes but also modernize the law and harmonize it with our climate efforts, rather than letting it undermine those efforts. While this specific plan may be dead, others are out there. Eventually one of them will pass. The other side has a lot more money and they have a solution to a system that is broken. I would not bet against them. It is time for a progressive solution. There’s at least four months in which one can be crafted. I hope that work is now under way.

Forty years after passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), it’s become fashionable to bash the landmark law as a 1970’s relic that is ripe for reform.  Those who would limit the effectiveness of CEQA argue that the law is a “job killer” and an impediment to economic growth.  Overhaul CEQA to limit public participation, as a Republican-led business group recently demanded of Governor Brown and the legislature, and California’s economy will miraculously recover.

They couldn’t be more mistaken.

As President of the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California and Chair of California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE), no one is more interested in creating jobs for Californians than I am. But I’m not interested in creating just any jobs. I want the kind of safe, sustainable and skilled jobs that will support workers and their communities over the long-term, and that are critical to the State’s future.

Since 1997, when a coalition of building trades and utility unions came together to establish CURE, we have  done more to improve the safety and reduce the environmental impacts of new power plants than anyone in California. Through the CEQA process, CURE has helped to cut smog-forming pollutants in half, increased the use of recycled water for cooling systems and pushed for groundbreaking controls on toxic air pollution as the standard for all new power plants.

At the same time, we have worked with energy developers to address the socioeconomic impacts of new energy projects by ensuring that the industry hires local workers and maintains the wage standards and working conditions that workers have struggled for over many decades. We have secured more than 30 million hours of construction work for eight new solar plants and nine state-of-the-art natural gas fired plants that will be built over the next three years.  These are good-paying green jobs, with health benefits and a secure retirement for the highly skilled workforce needed to build and maintain the conventional and renewable energy plants that power this state’s economy.

CURE’s participation in the CEQA process benefits the communities in which we live, by guaranteeing sustainable construction practices that minimize harm to the local environment, in turn ensuring  long term sustainable development.  This is environmental democracy, giving those affected by development a voice in its design, and it is exactly what the authors of CEQA intended to guarantee.  

So why do our critics persist?

Those who would “reform” CEQA, and don’t kid yourselves, they intend to gut it, want to limit the rights of ordinary citizens and community and labor groups such as ours to have a voice in projects affecting their communities.  Leave it to the developers to police themselves, the reformers argue, and don’t stand in the way of progress.  

That’s not how democracy works.  In our country, every citizen and every group has the right to express their views to our government.  The drafters of CEQA knew this, and they intended CEQA to foster a free flow of information – the good and the bad about a project.  That way, our government decision makers could make the most informed decision.  

The “reformers” would deprive the agency of information in the name of progress.  Anyone that has an economic interest, like ensuring long-term, sustainable jobs and communities, would be silenced.  Developers could tell the agency what was in their economic interest, but no one else with an economic interest could speak up.  

And it is not only workers that would be silenced.  Salmon fishermen would not be allowed to point out the flaws in a timber harvest plan that destroys salmon runs.  Farmers would not be allowed to point out that a power plant using groundwater would dry up the wells they depend on to farm.  Local Main Street businesses would not be able to show how a new 24-hour big-box store would blight downtown small business.  All because the fishermen and farmers and businesses also have an economic stake in the environmental outcome.

For forty years, CEQA has given Californians a voice. It is rightly called the “Bill of Rights for an Environmental Democracy.” Limiting public participation under CEQA will do nothing to improve California’s economy. But it will do irreparable harm to its environment. It’s time for all of us who care about protecting jobs and protecting our communities to stand up and defend CEQA.

Bob Balgenorth is President of the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California and Chair of California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE)  

You can’t get within fifty yards of a Republican in California without hearing a salvo about getting government off the back of business in order to create jobs. Of course, when you look at their most recent proposals, they are really talking about gutting environmental regulations to reward major campaign contributors in the utility, extraction, telecom, and development industries.

But they do have a point.

The regulatory system in California sucks. California government from top to bottom is too fragmented, disjointed, and decentralized. Getting anything done takes too long and costs too much, and it’s been getting worse as the Great Recession has led to the Great Evisceration of government.

What would real regulatory reform look like, and how would we get there?

As a background, I am the kind of geek who spent a Saturday morning at a study session by MWDOC on streamlining environmental regulation.

I’ve used CEQA to delay a general plan, and as a Council Member, I have voted for and against EIR’s. I’ve looked at developing a challenging piece of property I own in the Tahoe National Forest. I read EIR’s and Mitigated Negative Decs for the fun of it, working backwards from the Appendices, and I know how to work a scoping session.

Really, how can the state of California simultaneously require that local planning agencies cut greenhouse gas emissions with better coordination of land use and public transportation while the state and local transit agencies are hacking away at existing systems?

But there are some general principles that could be implemented over time with some real leadership and a comprehensive effort that brought all parties to the table.



Many Different Problems

The problems are myriad. For most businesses, government regulation starts at the local planning counter, where

A Sustained Conversation

Let’s start with the first, and most important observation. There is no midnight deal in the legislature that will fix the problems with



Collaboration is Key

If you talk to someone guiding a major project, you will quickly discover that the first word on their lips is collaboration, and particularly early collaboration. CEQA and the other permitting requirements for major projects is a stunningly inefficient process for creating paper and shuffling it around. Every agency wants to be last in line to comment or approve, and the conditions demanded by one agency may require recirculation of an EIR so that other agencies could comment.