Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has rolled back environmental regulations to help “expedite” recovery efforts from the destructive wildfires that have Californians reeling.
Newsom’s executive order suspended permitting and environmental reviews under the California Environmental Quality Act, one of the country’s strictest state-level regulations, and the California Coastal Act, which places stringent guidelines on oil and gas companies.
Over the weekend, Newsom suggested the environmental rules could obstruct fire victims’ ability to build back their homes and businesses destroyed during the crisis.
“I’m worried about issues of rebuilding as it relates to … scarcity of resources, materials, personnel. I’m worried about time to getting these projects done. So we want to fast-track by eliminating any CEQA requirements,” Newsom said during an NBC News interview on Sunday.
“We’re making sure people are getting their applications, addressing the issues of fraud, price gouging. We want to get our inspections teams out here. They’re already starting to get out here,” he continued. “We’ve come up with some timelines so we can get, within the next few weeks, all that done so people can get their insurance claims. We can then start the big contracts to remove the debris, address the hazardous materials issues.”
The fires have killed at least 24 people and destroyed thousands of structures in Los Angeles, and Newsom’s rolling back of the regulations is an attempt to help people recover. However, he previously backed regulations such as the California Coastal Act, which proponents painted as essential to creating a clean environment.
Newsom signed state Senate Bill 704, which made several changes to the CCA, into law in September 2023. The bill placed new requirements on large businesses to publicly report their greenhouse gas emissions. It was derided at the time by critics who called it a costly mandate that would negatively affect the state’s economy while failing to reduce emissions.
Advocates argued otherwise.
“This new law removes one more way for oil companies to potentially exploit our beautiful and productive coastline,” one green activist told the Lost Coast Outpost.
“If the federal government wanted to sell oil or gas leases here, we could much more easily block any kind of support facilities [that would be built] around Humboldt Bay or on the Samoa Peninsula now that this law has been signed,” Jennifer Kalt, executive director of the Humboldt Waterkeeper and another advocate for amending the CCA, similarly told the outlet. “This is a huge milestone.”
Newsom has softened some of the California Environmental Quality Act’s most stringent provisions. However, although he signed legislation into law in 2023 making several changes to CEQA, Newsom stopped far short of making a complete overhaul to the controversial environmental legislation.
Critics of the environmental regulations said Newsom’s latest executive order suspending the law was “an admission that we can safely build housing without CEQA.”
The same could be said the CCA, Jennifer Hernandez, a San Francisco attorney with the law firm Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group, told the Los Angeles Daily News.
“The governor’s executive order validates that these laws are in fact abused to cause delay and increase costs,” she added.
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Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association, told the outlet that in California, CEQA and the CCA “are our two roadblocks to building anything, and he’s [Newsom] signaling those two roadblocks will be removed.”
This isn’t the first time Newsom has rolled back environmental regulations to deal with wildfires. In 2019, he suspended some rules in a similar move, prompting backlash from environmentalists.