California’s surrender to the governing whims of environmentalists has put the state in a stranglehold. Actual progress is unattainable, and the arbitrary whims of activists and political partisans reign supreme.
The California Coastal Commission is one such example, having recently entered into the news due to its public feud with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The U.S. Air Force had planned to allow SpaceX to launch up to 50 rockets per year from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which sits between the cities of Lompoc and Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County. In rejecting this request, the CCC cited Musk’s political rhetoric, with the commission’s chairwoman citing Musk taking a position in the presidential election as reason enough to block this plan.
The CCC’s intrusion in property decisions is not limited to this politically motivated rejection. The CCC was established in 1976 after serving as a temporary commission for four years prior. It only took two years after that permanent designation for former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown to call the commissioners “bureaucratic thugs,” setting up a power struggle when Brown returned to the governor’s mansion in the 2010s.
The CCC began intruding into decisions made by private property owners, resulting in the commission being dragged in front of the Supreme Court in 1987 for holding construction permits hostage for people renovating their beachfront homes if they did not include public easements in their plans. Still, though, California Democrats only further empowered the commission, giving it the authority in 2014 to fine people for altering their property. This led to a massive increase in cases opened by the commission and thousands of intrusions into previously private land decisions along the West Coast.
You can see similar environmental interference from the California Environmental Quality Act, the 1970 state law that empowered all the worst environmental actors in the state. The California Supreme Court broadened the law in 1972, extending its requirements to any and all public projects. As a result, everything from energy infrastructure to housing is saddled with environmental reviews that delay infrastructure projects for years.
A study of CEQA challenges found in 2020 that 48,000 housing units were targeted by overzealous activists and stuck-up neighbors who didn’t want new housing built near them. That is nearly half of the state’s total housing production. Renewable energy projects have already needed a special accommodation that limits CEQA reviews to nine months, and they aren’t the only “green” and “environmentally friendly” projects that end up getting caught in the CEQA crossfire.
For example, CEQA has stifled hundreds of miles of bike lanes up and down the state, with lawsuits hitting Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, and San Francisco. Bike lanes have been subject to the law because they typically require cutting roads down a lane, which leads to more car congestion and has an environmental impact.
California’s infamous high-speed rail was also bogged down in CEQA lawsuits before the feds (in this case, the United States Surface Transportation Board) declared that federal law preempted CEQA and that the project must continue. The high-speed rail was then trapped by countless other things, including the fact that it is nothing more than a union boondoggle being run by the most incompetent state government in the country.
CEQA has even been used by businesses to hamstring rival businesses, with one gas station using the law to drown a rival gas station across the street in $500,000 worth of legal fees over the environmental impact review of adding three gas pumps. Labor unions have also hijacked the law to blackmail businesses into labor agreements. Filing CEQA lawsuits has become its own industry in California, driving up the costs of construction, creating massive delays, and scaring away the thought of most projects before they are even put in motion due to the massive regulatory burden.
CEQA is a disaster, and everyone sees it. Carveouts have been granted at the University of California, Berkeley, and exemptions have been pursued for construction projects in downtown San Francisco. California Democrats would rather wrestle with exemption after exemption every time someone with a political connection to a Democrat in the legislature wants to build something instead of actually reforming the law. That would require a stomach to cross the state’s rabid environmentalist faction and, simply, too much work.
Neither the California Coastal Commission nor CEQA are California’s oldest environmental intrusion on functioning governance. The California State Water Resources Control Board, which spawned from 1949 legislation, oversees the state’s funneling of water out to sea to protect minor endangered fish species. Even in good years, California watches the gifts of the winter storms wash out to sea thanks to the state’s refusal to build water storage or divert water to central and southern communities to protect a dying species of fish.
The board drags its feet on both water allotment for agricultural communities in the Central Valley and on dealing with toxic water that has plagued communities up and down the state for decades. The board can’t handle those most basic functions, but it is also in charge of making water plans for communities that violate state groundwater regulations. The board can’t address arsenic-tainted water within a decade, but surely, it can micromanage water usage in communities in which the board’s members never lived.
Building more water storage would solve a lot of the state’s water woes, making it so that even the state’s incompetent bureaucratic water agencies have too much water saved up to possibly mess up its allotments. However, building water storage is yet another area of construction beset by CEQA challenges, to the point that even Democratic hero Gov. Gavin Newsom has tried to force the courts to speed up CEQA reviews. California has been sitting on billions in water bonds for storage facilities that were voted on multiple droughts ago.
The circles California spins itself in over regulations are symptomatic of a state that has become accustomed to economic stagnation and decline punctuated by exceptions for politically connected developers that can get exemptions from the law. Reforming CEQA, reining in the California Coastal Commission, or overhauling the state’s water resources control board would anger too many people who have too much time on their hands (which they may be spending on frivolous CEQA challenges to bike lanes). Instead, the state waits for one fire to blossom so it can put it out with an exemption while waiting for the next dozen fires, all being started by the same few sources.
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The most notable part of all of this is that California is supposed to be the nation’s leader in “green” climate policies. California is the supposed model that every state should adopt if you ask a liberal activist or Democratic politician. That model, decades in the making, has given birth to bloated bureaucracies that prioritize animals over people and make it so that any random man or woman can become a human legal hurdle to any construction project that they wish.
Similar to every other policy area, California’s environmental policy regime needs a massive overhaul, and similar to every other policy area, California Democrats are too unfocused and lazy to handle that when they can spend their time trying to stake out further Left positions on every cultural matter that hits national headlines. As such, they have outsourced basic functions of government, such as permitting construction or providing clean water to environmental zealots, and are only now slowly realizing what an untenable regime they have created.