San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Supervisors vs. common sense
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has voted against common sense before, but not quite so explicitly.
The board on Tuesday unanimously endorsed legislation “expressly prohibiting the use of the commonsense exemption” from environmental review for projects found to have no conceivable detriment to the environment. The supervisors did so despite the pleas of city officials, who warned that the bill would subject work as minor as window replacements to costly, timeconsuming bureaucracy and pointlessly block new housing.
The resolution passed just before the latest report showing California residential construction slumping amid rising homelessness and one of the nation’s worst housing shortages. The Construction Industry Research Board reported that just over 100,000 home building permits were issued last year, down 9% from the year before. That’s a little more than half what officials believe the state needs and a fifth of the goal set by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Multifamily construction, the kind most needed to meet demand sustainably and affordably, plummeted 17%.
To hear San Francisco planning officials tell it, the supervisors aren’t helping. The legislation the board supports, SB37, would crack down on exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act, which is notoriously abused to block housing construction even on sites with no environmental implications. The bill is backed by the state laborers union, one of several trade unions that have used CEQA to force concessions from developers.
Written by state Sen. Dave Cortese, DSan Jose, the bill would require more environmental review of work on properties found on the Cortese List, a catalog of contaminated sites named for the senator’s father and predecessor in the Legislature, Dominic Cortese. Projects normally eligible for categorical exemption from CEQA review because they are deemed environmentally inconsequential can’t be excused on Cortese sites. SB37 would further prohibit work on the sites from being granted “commonsense” CEQA exemptions, which state guidelines allow when there is “no possibility that the activity in question may have a significant effect on the environment.”
Neighbors and lawyers opposing multifamily projects on former commercial sites in Cow Hollow and other neighborhoods have accused San Francisco officials of wrongly making categorical and commonsense exemptions for projects that would disturb polluted Cortese sites. “Pursuing these projects without public accountability and appropriate cleanup poses severe health risks to laborers working on the site, members of the community ... and future tenants,” Cortese said in presenting his legislation, which passed a Senate committee last month and is scheduled to be considered by another Monday.
But city officials say the legislation would impose stricter scrutiny on all manner of minor renovations with no discernible environmental benefit, while holding up more than 130 housing units a year. Lisa Gibson, the City Planning Department’s environmental review officer, told a supervisors committee that of the city’s over 2,300 Cortese sites, more than 2,200 are on the list for relatively innocuous nonindustrial heating oil tanks, and 90% of the sites have been cleaned. But window and door replacements, kitchen expansions and other minor jobs could face additional costs of $30,000 or more and delays of up to a year to comply with the legislation, even though city laws already match or exceed state environmental requirements.
“SB37 eliminates our ability to use the state’s commonsense exemption even for projects that would not touch the soil on already cleaned sites,” Gibson said. “Not to be glib, but it’s called ‘common sense’ for a reason.”
Officials should certainly protect the state and its residents from dangerous pollution, but California already provides too many opportunities for environmental laws to be misused in the service of NIMBYism. The supervisors don’t appear troubled by that. The Legislature should have more sense.