RCRC is co-sponsoring Senate Bill 607 (Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco) with Prosperity California, Housing Action Coalition, and the Bay Area Council.
The bill includes several targeted reforms to refocus the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) on real environmental issues while preserving the law’s original goals of information disclosure and environmental mitigation.
When enacted in 1970, CEQA was one of the state’s first meaningful environmental protection laws. Since then, CEQA has expanded into a complex regulatory obligation with serious consequences resulting from procedural or substantive missteps. In 1975 the final Environmental Impact Report for an 83-unit Golden Gate Heights Residential Development Project in San Francisco was 188 pages. In contrast, the 2018 the draft Environmental Impact Report for a smaller, 35-unit residential Ball Estates Project in Contra Costa County was well over 1,600 pages. Aside from the costs and time it takes to prepare those documents, litigation challenging the adequacy of those reports can take years to resolve and add millions of dollars in costs. As such, CEQA is often rightly criticized today as a litigation trap that can be exploited by those seeking competitive gain or to stop projects altogether.
SB 607 improves CEQA’s clarity and efficiency, expedites housing production, right sizes environmental review of projects that would qualify for existing statutory or categorical exemptions but for a single circumstance, reduces regulatory complexity, and reduces the risk of prolonged litigation delays. In particular, SB 607:
- Exempts from CEQA rezonings that are consistent with an approved housing element.
- Replaces the “fair argument standard” for negative declarations and mitigated negative declarations with the substantial evidence standard.
- Narrows the scope of CEQA review for projects that would otherwise be categorically or statutorily exempt but for a single condition, in which case the initial study or EIR is only required to examine the effects caused by that single condition.
- Expands the Class 32 infill exemption to unincorporated areas.
- Requires the state to establish objective and measurable safe harbors that lead agencies may elect to use when making habitat, traffic, noise, air quality, water quality, utility service determinations under to the Class 32 categorical exemption.
- Narrows the universe of written materials that are part of the CEQA administrative record by excluding communications of persons tangential or removed from project decision-making.
Together, these changes will preserve CEQA’s core environmental review and mitigation functions while reducing administrative cost, delays, the risk of litigation, and the length of litigation review. This means faster project delivery for everything from the addition of classrooms on school sites to construction of critical local infrastructure to the production of housing.
RCRC’s Co-Sponsor letter can be found here.
For more information, contact RCRC Senior Policy Advocate John Kennedy.