The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Environment advocates battle powerful state lawmaker’s plan
In an ironic twist of timing, Earth Day this year brought an unpleasant task to Connecticut land and water conservation groups, a task they hoped they would never need to do.
Sure, they’ve had an upbeat slate of events this week including planting trees with the governor. And of course they’re working to pass planetfriendly bills in the final weeks of the General Assembly session.
But oddly, they find themselves in a battle against a powerful lawmaker who’s often on their side, not to adopt a bill he opposes but rather to stop a measure they consider a grave threat to environmental protection.
On Monday night, Earth Day, 46 groups led by Save the Sound sent an urgently worded letter to all state legislators calling for rejection of a bill that would pave a path for more housing. The bill, the letter said, would gut key defenses in the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), and in wetland preservation laws, by limiting who could bring lawsuits under CEPA and by allowing towns to carve out areas that would become exempt from wetland laws in residential projects.
“This would be the biggest environmental rollback ever,” Roger Reynolds, senior legal director at Save the Sound, told me. “We can’t protect the environment without these landmark laws.”
The chief architect of HB 5475, House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, DEast Hartford, said Tuesday, after receiving the letter, that Connecticut’s failure to create desperately needed affordable and market-rate housing calls for a rethinking of how some regulations are enforced.
“There’s no doubt that there are environmental laws which keep us from doing lots of things including affordable housing,” Rojas told me.
On Tuesday, seeking a compromise, Rojas said the section of the bill allowing towns to exempt properties from state wetlands laws would be removed. “I understand that was a step too far,” he told me.
That didn’t satisfy Save the Sound, the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters and other activists, who said the threat to CEPA remains a red line for them.
Environmental activists say they strongly favor affordable housing. This isn’t a ruse for antidevelopment NIMBY exclusion, the sort we often see by opponents of developments especially in rich towns, who cite environment concerns. They don’t oppose a part of the bill that would make it easier to convert nursing homes to apartments foe the general population.
“Increasing resident access to safe and sustainable homes is an environmental justice value, a value we support,” the letter said. They insist Rojas and other supporters of the bill — all or nearly all of them Democrats — are setting up a false choice between environmental protection and residential development.
“We need both and if somebody is telling you there’s a tradeoff, it’s a false narrative,” Reynolds said.
Rojas does see a tradeoff. In his testimony for the bill before the Planning and Development Committee on March 13, he said it and a companion bill “make strides” toward housing goals, “primarily through loosening regulations that exacerbate costs and bring development timelines to a crawl.”
Frustration for advocates
The core of the issue is a dispute over what causes housing proposals, especially for affordable rental units, to die in Connecticut towns. The answer, of course, could fill a long book. The environmental activists say it isn’t the landmark protection laws that are now more than 50 years old. Rather, they say, it’s local opponents loudly and vaguely citing environmental harms.
“It’s not the lawsuits, it’s the noise,” Reynolds said, “and you’re not going to get rid of the noise and the opposition….by repealing legitimate environmental protections.”
What will happen, he said, is a weakening of protections for places such as a 1,000-acre coastal forest in Old Saybrook that was spared from a golf course and luxury housing plan when Save the Sound invoked the CEPA.
“The bill that has been constructed does nothing to assure that what is proposed becomes affordable housing,” said Lori Brown, who lobbies for environment bills as executive director of the League of Conservation Voters.
Rojas said the bill would preserve the rights of people who could bring actions — abutters, basically — if they are truly affected by a development. He said he’s willing to extend that to include any nonprofit group such as Save the Sound. The activists told him that’s still not good enough, he said.
“These are the very same people that will be for affordable housing but ultimately oppose anything that might actually get us there, without compromise,” Rojas said. “They have taken the position that we must be purist on everything.”
Looking from 40,000 feet, this bill easing restrictions on residential construction reflects political frustrations on both sides. Housing and environmental advocates alike have suffered many high-profile defeats in recent years in large part because it’s damn near impossible to pass major reforms and easy to stop even modest ideas.
Brown sees a “backing away from really strong voices” on the environment.
Avoiding an ugly floor battle
Politically, the bill sets up an uncomfortable battle between Democrats. It passed in the Planning and Development Committee March 22 in a straight party-line vote with all Republicans opposing it, after testimony was overwhelmingly opposed.
Rojas, who I called a “peacemaker” in a column on housing bills hanging in the balance last week, is of course a powerful figure at the Capitol, as the likely next House speaker. He and other supporters of the bill would now face opposition from pro-environment Democrats with whom they typically align.
“We let him know in no uncertain terms that we were going to start leveling up,” Brown said, “doing whatever we had to do.”
We’re not likely to see an ugly, intra-party floor battle on this. For one thing, Rojas and House Speaker Matt Ritter, DHartford, are way too smart and too adept at negotiating to let that happen. Besides, with only two weeks left in a short session, there isn’t time for a long fight.
Republicans, for their part, may oppose the bill but it’s a complex dynamic for them, too. Reynolds makes the point that the GOP often lines up for protection of sensitive areas and for tools to halt development that adds density to towns. On the other hand, many in the party favor giving power to towns and they support free-market economic activity — goals this bill advances.
The bill has the strong backing of home builders. Advocates for affordable housing have sat it out for the most part, favoring other bills instead, although the Partnership for Strong Communities testified in favor of it.
One possible compromise: Narrow the bill to favor only high-density housing where it’s appropriate, in town centers and along developed corridors, not in pristine areas. For now, the environmentalists see an assault on a foundation they thought was secure.
“It’s horrible to be working on Earth Day to try to stop legislators from repealing longstanding environmental protections and rolling back the clock,” Reynolds, at Save the Sound, told me, “basically to allow polluters to make a bigger profit.”