Letter from Sacramento: Let’s Talk About CEQA

For more than 50 years, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has been one of the most important disclosure laws in the state.

Since then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1970, CEQA has required builders to analyze, disclose, and mitigate a proposed project’s potentially significant environmental impacts. That is, it has forced transparency.

CEQA has protected iconic landscapes throughout the state, safeguarded communities from the activities of polluting industries, and helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The law necessitates a public process: communities come together to debate projects and make sure that developers and other project proponents improve plans that threaten significant harm to communities or the environment.

A key element of CEQA is citizen enforcement. No one state entity monitors or enforces the law. Rather, when citizens feel that a developer or project proponent has not complied with the law, they are empowered to sue the developer or project proponent. This makes sense given that no single enforcement agency could fully understand the nuances of each community and the environmental impacts that could result from new projects in those communities.

If this background on CEQA sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you’ve seen or read at least one story about CEQA in the media in the last few weeks, specifically as it relates to UC Berkeley (You can read about that here. I’ll talk more about this later).

Many of the recent stories tend to put CEQA in a bad light. But we’ve seen this before.

Every legislative session, developers, their front groups, and others with an interest in exploiting California’s environment and communities pick a single project that has been stopped under CEQA, and elevate it in a public campaign. Their goal is simple: build public disdain for CEQA and use that to persuade legislators to introduce and pass bills that will roll back CEQA’s reach or requirements.

And every legislative session, environmental justice advocates, Sierra Club California, and other environmental groups rally together to push back on this narrative because we see the unique value CEQA affords California’s ecosystems and communities.

Before CEQA’s enactment, public agencies and local governments could approve projects of any size without considering their impacts on the environment and public health. Communities’ only recourse at the time was an undefined hodgepodge of legal actions.

But today, groups around the state rely on CEQA to uphold the rights of environmental justice and underserved communities. Whether protecting their water resources, preventing soil from toxic contamination, or keeping their air clean and breathable, the CEQA process is critical for communities to have a meaningful voice in local planning decisions to protect the environmental health of their neighborhoods.

For instance, in 2018, the oil company Petro-Lud applied for a permit from the City of Arvin to drill and operate four wells in a residential area. This project would have allowed oil and gas drilling operations to operate 24/7, and operations would have occurred across the street from homes, schools, and parks. Despite the obvious environmental and public health impacts this would have on the community, the City of Arvin concluded that this project would be exempt from CEQA and approved the project. A community group, Committee for a Better Arvin, filed a challenge under CEQA. In 2019, a court found that the City of Arvin violated CEQA and rescinded the project approval.

This is just one of many examples where CEQA did what it was enacted to do: protect a community from the harmful effects of a highly polluting and disruptive project.

At the same time, CEQA has become an essential tool in fighting climate change. The law now requires public agencies to analyze the climate impacts resulting from projects’ greenhouse gas emissions, and to reduce those impacts to the extent feasible. CEQA also helps agencies address emerging climate-related threats like increased wildfire risk. For example, the CEQA Guidelines now require agencies to analyze whether a project will increase wildfire risk and expose occupants to danger.

CEQA’s critics don’t want you to focus on or even hear about CEQA’s success in these areas. Instead, they argue that CEQA litigation exacerbates California’s housing crisis. But the statistics say otherwise.

As a 2021 report commissioned by the Rose Foundation documents, CEQA is not a major barrier to housing development. The housing crisis exists as a result of several factors, including high building costs, non-CEQA related neighborhood opposition, and local zoning patterns. Furthermore, many housing projects do not require environmental review at all because of CEQA’s infill exemptions and provisions allowing tiering from specific or community plans.

It’s true that NIMBY groups can use CEQA to delay projects, but litigation under CEQA is actually rare. Since 2002, CEQA lawsuits have maintained an average of less than 200 cases per year despite the growing population of California. Only 2% of all projects that require an environmental review document face lawsuits. Developers’ and others’ claims that CEQA litigation runs rampant are simply false.

Likewise, critics’ assertions that CEQA stands in the way of bicycle lanes and transit improvements are wildly inaccurate. CEQA exempts pedestrian and bike facilities and most public transit projects in urbanized areas. Sierra Club California has worked with legislators on the bills that provided these exemptions, not because we oppose the projects outright (many of them can reduce vehicle miles traveled and thus lower greenhouse emissions) but to ensure that the language doesn’t have unintended consequences for communities and the environment.

There is a long and storied history of developers, polluters, and other interests seeking to get rid of CEQA simply because they find the law inconvenient. But the fact of the matter is that CEQA’s requirement for these entities to do their due diligence and take a little more time to analyze and reduce the environmental and community impacts of their projects is a positive for Californians.

Now back to that Berkeley case. University of California campuses around the state have had a tense relationship with local communities because of the campus’s impact on housing stock. In Berkeley, the university mostly abandoned its responsibility to house its students long ago, creating a growing pressure on the existing housing stock in the community. Just 22% of UC Berkeley’s roughly 40,000 students live in university-owned housing.

A CEQA lawsuit was a last-ditch measure to get the campus to respond. It’s a fair debate whether that was the right tool. But as Assemblymember Luz Rivas - chair of the Assembly committee where CEQA bills are evaluated and scrutinized - stated, “[t]his isn’t really [CEQA] litigation run amuck but a case where UC Berkeley disregarded the clear, long-standing requirement to plan for increased enrollment.”

In contrast, travel south to the University of California at Los Angeles. Earlier this month, as the Berkeley case and the legislature’s response drew headlines, UCLA announced that it would guarantee housing to all newly admitted students. That’s a step in the right direction that other campuses ought to emulate. (I’m looking at you, Cal.)

CEQA is one of the state’s most powerful laws to achieve sustainable and resilient communities. It provides a public process that can address environmental injustice, public health hazards, and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not infallible, and like many laws, it can be employed in ways its drafters never considered. But legislators shouldn’t heed the call of corporate developers, gut or reform CEQA to assuage their concerns, and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Over the past 50 years, CEQA has served as an important tool for climate advocates to defend their communities from environmental harm and pollution. Anyone who cares about the environment and/or the health and safety of their community has something to gain from CEQA.

Sincerely,