XPost: ca.environment, alt.politics.republicans, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/us/california-environment-newsom-
ceqa.html

California leaders on Monday rolled back a landmark law that was a
national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified
as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and
homelessness crisis.

For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental
Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well
as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop
projects they found objectionable.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills, which were written by Democrats but
had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, that
will allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental
review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that
have discouraged construction in the state.

Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which
they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself
on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took
them to task for the vote.

But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic
hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly
40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent
homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.

“If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust, and that’s
just the truth,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a news conference. “And
so this is so much bigger in many ways than the issue itself. It is about
the reputation of not just Sacramento and the legislative leadership and executive leadership, but the reputation of the state of California.”

Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced
at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by
opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.

Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled
back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that
voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.

“This has created a different political environment,” said Mark
Baldassare, survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Voters have been telling us in our polling for quite a while that the
cost of housing is a big problem, but maybe for the elected officials the election itself was a wake-up call.”

Mr. Newsom is nearing the end of his second and final term in office
having made little progress on housing and homelessness, which were
central to his first campaign in 2018. He has been skewered for the
prevalence of homeless encampments throughout California and for a dip in population, driven in part by people seeking lower-priced homes in other states.

The governor, who may run for president in 2028, recognized that Democrats
had to shift course on pocketbook issues.

“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” he said last week.

The changes are, by any measure, a pivotal moment for the environmental movement, and they may have implications beyond the borders of the
nation’s most populous state. California has long been at the vanguard of pioneering environmental measures, and other Democratic-run states could similarly look for ways to encourage more housing construction.

Environmentalists flooded a legislative hearing room on Monday, saying the sweeping changes could hurt sensitive ecosystems and make it too easy to
build manufacturing sites that could cause more pollution. Some Democratic lawmakers expressed concern that the legislation could threaten habitat
for certain species of butterflies, bears and bighorn sheep.

“Jeopardizing those whole ecosystems, I think, is a risk that we don’t
want to take,” said State Senator Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat.

With its requirements for extensive review and public disclosure of
potential environmental ramifications, CEQA was viewed as the strictest
measure of its kind in the nation.

As governor, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the environmental act
into law in 1970 at a time when his party was much more aligned with environmental protections than it is today. It reflected a consensus among
the state’s leaders over the need to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources — forests, mountains and coastline — from being spoiled
by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion and suburban sprawl.

But CEQA has been described even by some environmentalists as a good law
that produced unintended consequences. The law was initially written to
apply principally to government projects; a 1972 court decision expanded
it to apply to many private projects as well.

One of the bills signed on Monday will exempt from CEQA high-density
projects as long as they are not on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites. The other bill will create sweeping changes that are aimed at accelerating legal review and that will exempt numerous types of
development projects, from farmworker housing to child care centers. The legislation will also make it easier to rezone areas to allow for more
housing in some cities.

The changes could, for instance, make it easier to convert a vacant
shopping center into condos and apartments by reducing government hurdles.

Republicans have long blamed CEQA for California’s problems, arguing that
it was bad for the state’s business climate. It was notable that
Democrats, led by Mr. Newsom, moved the party away from the kind of
measure that has long been central to Democratic thought.

“It is so critically important for California to show that we can get
things done to make people’s lives better and more affordable,” said State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat who wrote the bill to exempt several
types of projects from environmental review.

California legislators have become increasingly motivated to combat the
state’s housing shortage as homelessness and the cost of living have
become serious concerns for residents. In recent years, the Legislature
has passed hundreds of bills to expedite housing production, and has tried
to push cities to build more homes, usually tinkering around the edges of
the environmental act.

“The crisis has metastasized to such a level that our constituents are demanding it,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Bay Area Democrat who
wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects.

Christopher S. Elmendorf, a property law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has closely followed the CEQA battles in the State Capitol, said the reforms were “huge,” the biggest since the mid-1970s.

Mr. Elmendorf said he viewed Mr. Newsom’s shift partly as a testament to
how much housing has risen as a priority for California voters. But it
also reflects a broader reckoning for Democrats nationwide after Donald
Trump’s re-election in 2024. Democrats are re-evaluating whether they are aligned with the needs of the electorate, he said, which has opened the
door for considering positions that were once off-limits.

Opponents of construction projects — neighborhood groups, rival
businesses, unions — frequently seized on CEQA provisions to delay or, in
some cases, kill all kinds of projects, including housing, office
buildings and homeless shelters.

Recent cases have come to symbolize what critics of the environmental law
saw as its unintended consequences. In San Francisco, it was used to
delay, but ultimately not derail, a bike path. In Berkeley, a neighborhood group used it to block the University of California from expanding the
size of its student population, contending it would lead to noise, trash
and traffic; the Legislature stepped in and passed a bill overriding a
court decision. Another group in Berkeley won a court order blocking construction of a new dorm because students would create “social noise” pollution; the Legislature again passed an overriding law.

As in Berkeley, previous efforts to change CEQA had largely been
piecemeal, responding to the crisis of the moment and often with the
backing of powerful labor unions. When the Sacramento Kings threatened to
move out of the state, the Legislature granted an exemption for the construction of a new arena. Similar exemptions were given for stadiums in
San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as for a major renovation of the
State Capitol.

Matt Lewis, spokesman for California YIMBY, which supports the new
legislation, said a law that had initially been intended to prevent
projects like new freeways from plowing through neighborhoods had over the years been “Frankensteined” into a tool to block housing development. And
the act, ultimately, has harmed the environment by limiting denser
housing, which reduces pollution, he said.

But Kim Delfino, a lobbyist for several environmental groups, said the law would allow the destruction of coastal habitats, forests, deserts and grasslands, and called it the “worst bill” for declining species that she
had seen in 25 years of advocacy.

“It blows a hole in our efforts to protect habitat,” she told lawmakers on Monday. “Make no mistake, this will be devastating.”

Still, Robert Rivas, the speaker of the State Assembly, framed the vote as
a social issue for Democrats during a news conference after the vote.

“Affordable housing is the civil rights struggle of our time here in California,” he said, “and today we take a transformative step forward in
that fight.”

Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation
at the University of California, Berkeley, said the changes will speed up
the building process because projects in the urban core will be able to
skip environmental review, which can take several months. He said it
remained unclear how much that will increase total housing production, especially given the inflated costs of construction, insurance and
interest rates.

“It’s probably not the full solution,” he said of the changes.

In 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown also proposed exempting urban housing from CEQA.
But that attempt failed under opposition from unions, environmental groups
and other organizations. Mr. Metcalf, who at the time was leading
California’s housing department under Mr. Brown, said that the political
winds had shifted in the past nine years.

He said that California’s moves could inspire other Democratic-led states
to weaken their environmental regulations to address their housing
shortages. Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and several other left-
leaning states have laws much like CEQA.

“I could certainly see it emboldening other governors: ‘If they can do it
in California, we can do it, too,’” he said.


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November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

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