'The law that swallowed California': Why the much-derided CEQA is so hard to change - Yahoo News
The landmark 1970 law for preserving California's beauty has a long history of backfiring.
Although the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, has made it harder to drain wetlands, pave nature preserves and build oil refineries, it has also stymied the construction of bike lanes, affordable housing and public transportation.
When CEQA recently threatened thousands of young Californians' admissions to the state's flagship public university, legislators had enough. They introduced a bill to let the students enroll, passed it unanimously, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it all within four days.
“Admit those students now UC Berkeley,” state Sen. Sydney Kamlager (D-Los Angeles) tweeted after the vote. “Students are not pollutants!”
Yet despite the outrage surrounding the Berkeley incident and regular, high-profile examples of the law blocking environmentally friendly projects, few believe that legislators will use the Berkeley case as an excuse for an overhaul. Too many interests — including environmentalists, labor unions and neighborhood groups — support CEQA, and any attempt to make robust changes threatens blowback and failure.
What’s more likely is that lawmakers will continue to poke holes in the law, exempting or setting aside CEQA only in certain situations while leaving more widespread concerns about the law’s effects on development unchallenged.
“Politicians will always fix a problem as narrowly as they possibly can, particularly when fixing a problem broadly is politically difficult,” said Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and publisher of the California Planning & Development Report. “The idea of limiting the California dream to UC Berkeley students resonated as an issue where somehow limiting the California dream by limiting the amount of housing does not.”
On its face, CEQA is a simple law. It requires developers to study a project’s environmental effects on the surrounding community and take steps to reduce or eliminate them. But the law can result in thousands of pages of studies examining everything from soil samples, to traffic to shadows a project might cast. Successful court challenges can send a project back to square one. The whole process, lawsuit or not, can sometimes take years to resolve.
source: https://news.yahoo.com/law-swallowed-california-why-much-120046824.html
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