The Environmental Law That Is Strangling California - The Wall Street Journal

Pat Brown, California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, helped make the University of California the world’s pre-eminent public university system. In 1970 he said that he had given “the highest priority to education, because I felt the greatness of California would depend upon an educated people.” That same year, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the first holistic environmental-review statute enacted by a state—the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.

The law was intended to ensure that consideration of environmental impact would be a part of the government’s approval process for construction projects. While it has done that, plaintiff attorneys and their clients have made an art of extracting concessions from developers or stopping projects altogether—often for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the environment.

CEQA now threatens the Golden State’s status as the country’s most dynamic economy and imperils the educational and economic prospects of the next generation of Californians.

In response to a CEQA lawsuit brought by a local group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, a California court in August 2021 capped future enrollment at UC Berkeley at its 2020-21 level. The university can’t expand enrollment until it prepares a lengthy environmental-impact report that addresses, among other things, the alleged strain that additional students would put on local emergency services and the noise and trash they create. In February the Court of Appeal denied the university’s request to stay the limit on enrollment. The California Supreme Court on March 3 declined to stay the lower court’s order freezing enrollment.

Under the order, UC Berkeley has to tell more than 3,000 qualified students that they can’t attend the university this fall. The school will lose $57 million in tuition. The ironies are many and bitter. UC Berkeley’s recent efforts to increase student enrollment are in service to the progressive goal of providing world-class educational opportunities to historically underserved Californians.

This collision between the UC system and CEQA was predictable. So too was the mudslinging among activists that followed the Court of Appeal’s decision, the raft of emergency filings with the California Supreme Court, and the introduction of legislation in Sacramento to “fix” the problem. The one silver lining of this battle in Berkeley is that almost everyone in California now agrees that CEQA is broken and in need of reform.

For years the law has been used to stymie new housing construction, wildfire protection, green transportation, renewable energy and other infrastructure necessary to support the world’s fifth-largest economy. California stagnated under CEQA. It has put the Golden State at war with itself.

A proposal by state Sen. Scott Wiener to “fix” the problem by allowing the state’s three public college systems to build housing without conducting lengthy environmental reviews doesn’t address the underlying problems with CEQA. It simply continues the Legislature’s longstanding practice of adopting “exemptions” for narrow categories of activities or projects such as homeless shelters, and “streamlining” for certain mega-projects, such as new stadiums.

These exemptions take enough pressure off the politicians to prevent comprehensive reform. They also ease pressure on the courts that have presided over the expansion of CEQA into a monstrously complex and convoluted body of law. Society hasn’t benefited from the exemptions, which mete out justice to those who can afford to lobby the state Legislature—and continue to prioritize the interests of small groups of locals over worthy statewide policy objectives.

Californians shouldn’t let the serious crisis confronting UC Berkeley go to waste. Sacramento must refrain from passing more exemptions or streamlining bills and require CEQA suits to be filed in the California Courts of Appeal, rather than the trial courts in each of California’s 58 counties. This would encourage CEQA plaintiffs to think more seriously before filing suit and spur the appellate courts to increase their scrutiny of those suits. It would also help limit what is often the biggest litigation sledgehammer: delay. The Legislature should also amend CEQA to discourage, rather than encourage, litigation.

For the benefit of all Californians, it’s time for the Legislature to modernize CEQA so that it protects the environment and allows for educational opportunity, housing and infrastructure.

Mr. Carr is chairman of the environment and energy practice group at Paul Hastings LLP in San Francisco and a co-author of “The CEQA Gauntlet,” a new study published by the Pacific Research Institute.

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source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-law-uc-university-california-berkely-students-enrollment-college-applications-acceptance-rejection-campus-building-codes-ceqa-11646864365

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