SF law expert: Washington/Oregon don't have CEQA. Why should CA?

For the LA Times, UC Davis land use law professor Chris Elmendorf analyzes Newsom's all-bark-and-no-bite approach to reforming California's Environmental Quality Act. Rather than begging judges to move faster, Newsom should look to Washington (which no longer does environmental review for urban housing projects) and Oregon (which uses urban growth boundaries in lieu of onerous approval processes). Big surprise: These states' housing projects aren't as “paralyzed” by NIMBYism and constrained supply.

In February, after yet another court decision stalling sorely needed housing development, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared that California’s landmark environmental law is “broken.”

The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, is supposed to protect the environment by requiring governments to study and mitigate any harms of development before they approve it. But as Newsom noted, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “wealthy homeowners” (among others) to block housing — often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least environmental impact.

And housing isn’t all that’s on the line. To meet the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and secure its share of federal green-energy funding — California needs to quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, electricity transmission lines, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure package to “assert a different paradigm.” No longer would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and process.” Going forward, the state would commit itself to “results....”

In sum, Newsom’s big push to reform a “broken” law won him a statutory right to implore judges to speed up a few more cases — and little else.

If you want to see what real reform looks like, look north. Washington state legislators voted overwhelmingly this year to eliminate environmental review for every urban housing project that conforms to a city’s general plan and zoning laws. Deep-green Oregon, meanwhile, never saw the need for a CEQA-like law. It adopted urban growth boundaries instead, preserving the countryside while allowing cities to approve new housing without the “paralysis” Newsom bemoaned.

Oregon and Washington, in other words, chose results.

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Read the whole thing here.

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