CEQA reform starts with Newsom
Last week, a California appeals court put yet another UC Berkeley plan to build muchneeded housing on hold — this time for about 1,100 students and 125 lower-income and homeless people in historic People’s Park.
The reason? The First District Appellate Court found the university’s proposal failed to comply with several facets of the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, the state’s landmark environmental protection law that’s often weaponized to delay or deny new developments. The court directed UC Berkeley to postpone the project until it completes another environmental review that, among other things, adequately addresses neighbor concerns about the potential noise impact of “loud student parties.”
That housing for a student population — that is by some accounts 10% homeless — could be held hostage by hypothetical concerns over party noise says everything you need to know about CEQA’s failure to live up to a contemporary understanding of environmental harm.
Thankfully, state lawmakers have already proposed fixes. Assembly Member Josh Hoover, R-Folsom (Sacramento County), introduced a bill to specify that population growth and noise resulting from a housing project cannot be considered an environmental impact under CEQA, and state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, has vowed to introduce legislation to prevent CEQA from requiring “evaluation of the type of people who will live in proposed new housing.”
These are common-sense measures that should pass and be signed into law. But they are also the equivalent of BandAids patching bullet holes.
CEQA requires sweeping, comprehensive reforms so that infill housing projects in urban, transit-friendly areas can’t continue to be bogged down by fraudulent lawsuits or weaponized by NIMBYs, labor and environmental groups to kill projects or extract unreasonable concessions.
That’s a task the state Legislature should take on. But a champion for comprehensive reform has yet to raise their hand.
Who better to do so than Gov. Gavin Newsom?
“California cannot afford to be held hostage by NIMBYs who weaponize CEQA to block student and affordable housing,” Newsom said in a statement following the People’s Park ruling. “The law needs to change, and I am committed to working with lawmakers this year to making more changes so our state can build the housing we desperately need.”
Bold and much-needed words. Newsom should put the might of his office where his mouth is by developing a robust package of bills to overhaul CEQA and shepherd it through the Legislature.
The strategy would align with the governor’s recent focus on pursuing policy change through legislation rather than executive action. Last year, many of Newsom’s most ambitious proposals were accomplished legislatively, including bills to establish CARE Court — to help more severely mentally ill people access treatment and housing — and to advance aggressive climate goals while extending the life span of California’s last nuclear power plant.
Newsom has been successful: Despite the intense controversy, the Legislature passed CARE Court overwhelmingly. Lawmakers also approved five of Newsom’s six climate bills even though they were introduced with only about three weeks left in the legislative session.
The governor recognizes — and bragged about — his ability to shape legislative action. “I had to jam my own Democratic Legislature in the last few weeks of our session to get these … climate bills done,” Newsom said during an appearance at Climate Week NYC. “Had I not done that, all those special interests would have prevailed again to deny and delay.”
Newsom later apologized for those comments. But if he’s that confident in his capacity to prevent lawmakers from being swayed by special interests, all the more reason he should apply his talents to CEQA reform.
Almost every interest group under the sun has leveraged the law to achieve their own aims — many of which don’t relate to the environment — and lawmakers have historically been wary of taking on sweeping reforms that could put them at odds with powerful groups, such as the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which have traditionally opposed CEQA streamlining bills that don’t come with strict labor requirements.
The Newsom administration could reform the law in other ways. Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor and California housing law expert, has argued that two state agencies — the Office of Planning and Research and the California Natural Resources Agency — should more aggressively wield their power to establish CEQA guidelines and exemptions to ensure infill and green-energy projects aren’t weighed down by unnecessary reviews and lawsuits.
Any significant changes along these lines likely will be met with legal challenges, but that hasn’t stopped Newsom or the Legislature from pursuing other ambitious policies. And, although courts have historically interpreted CEQA broadly, increasing its powers and widening its scope, some have also acknowledged its limitations — and the ways in which it can be abused.
The California Supreme Court, in a 2015 ruling — ironically, one dealing with another Berkeley CEQA lawsuit — argued, “Rules regulating the protection of the environment must not be subverted into an instrument for the oppression and delay of social, economic, or recreational development and advancement.”
By repeatedly failing to rein in CEQA and stand up to the groups that have wielded it in bad faith, California lawmakers have enabled the state’s housing crisis — forcing people out of the state or worse, onto our streets.
Legislators need to take bold steps to mitigate the impacts of their inaction. Newsom can and should force their hands to do so.