California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed what he calls “historic legislation” to reform CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. The San Francisco Democrat hailed “a belief in abundance over scarcity,” that will build more housing, faster, and which “will be felt for generations to come.” That leaves Californians with plenty to ponder.
CEQA “requires volumes of paperwork and reviews for virtually every proposed construction project,” writes Steven Greenhut, and “allows basically any ‘stakeholder’ to file or threaten a lawsuit over CEQA compliance, which delays projects, adds costs to them, and kills many others.” So “it’s hard to argue that it actually helps the environment.” Supporters of CEQA, who claim to stand for the environment, are more accurately described as exclusionists. (RELATED: Why, Yes, Regulatory Reform Is Possible)
In a variant of apartheid, this movement seeks to wall off human beings from the natural creation.
Human beings are “guests in this landscape,” contends Marissa Christiansen, executive director of the Climate and Wildfire Institute in Los Angeles. In a variant of apartheid, this movement seeks to wall off human beings from the natural creation.
California Senate Bill 337 designates a full 30 percent of the state’s land area off-limits to development, notes Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy at the California Policy Center in Sacramento. As Ring observes, “publicly managed land is far worse off ecologically in California than privately managed land,” but there’s more to it.
The Golden State is only five percent urbanized, and that is where 94 percent of the state’s population lives. In the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, the exclusionists want to make it denser, which they call “smart cities.” What is needed in Los Angeles County, Ring contends, is “more development into the ridges and canyons surrounding the existing city, not less.” The exclusionists won’t have it, and California has institutionalized the restrictions.
For example, the unelected California Coastal Commission (CCC) seeks to preserve the state’s coastal region in as “natural” a state as possible. To that end, the CCC blocks development and has made the coast a millionaires’ enclave.
The CCC also rides roughshod over property rights and looks askance at the clearing of vegetation, which can contribute to wildfires. The CCC made some effort to suspend permits for victims of the LA fires. They have a right to wonder why they needed a CCC permit in the first place, but as it stands, there’s not much they can do about it.
The CCC overrides scores of elected city and local governments and works against the people in other ways. In 2022, for example, Commissioner Dayna Bochco, a television producer, proclaimed that “the ocean is under attack from climate change already.” On the basis of that superstition, the CCC rejected the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Orange County, which would have provided 50 million gallons of fresh water a day.
An unelected body thus excludes Californians from the full benefit of their greatest natural resource, the Pacific Ocean. All told, it’s hard to argue that the CCC actually benefits the environment, and Katy Grimes of the California Globe has doubts about Newsom’s reforms.
“California’s absurdly strict environmental guidelines and restrictions prevent most large-scale projects from ever taking place without legislative intervention,” Grimes explains. “Instead, the California Legislature makes annual noise about the need for CEQA reforms, but always kills any sincere attempts at real reform.” Steven Greenhut finds a preview of how the reforms would work in practice.
Newsom has already exempted reconstruction projects from CEQA and the Coastal Commission, but as of July 2, only one building permit had been approved in Pacific Palisades and only 46 in the Eaton unincorporated area. More than five months after the fires ended, “there’s little to show for it in terms of actual rebuilding.” Meanwhile, Newsom’s “abundance” rhetoric also needs clarification.
“Abundance liberalism” is the hot new idea making waves and provoking fierce internal debate among the progressive intelligentsia recently,” explains Steven F. Hayward of Pepperdine University. “The thesis, in short, is that excessive government regulation — especially in blue states — has badly hampered economic growth [who knew?], and that progressives should embrace a pro-growth agenda that involves reducing overregulation and endless process.”
Professor Hayward is not surprised that California’s CEQA reforms have drawn fire from “environmental fundamentalists.” Calling them exclusionists will clarify the debate from coast to coast.
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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.