Battle lines are being drawn in California over a legislative push to overhaul a key state environmental law.

At issue is the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act's required "environmental impact reports" for any development project that needs state or local approval -- reviews blamed by the law's critics for permitting delays and increased building costs. The state law is more sweeping than the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires reviews only for projects needing federal approval or funding (Greenwire, Dec. 11, 2012).

"Could it be modified so it's less cumbersome and an easier process to navigate? Absolutely," said a spokeswoman for state Sen. Noreen Evans (D), who's working on a bill to streamline CEQA. "She's seen both sides of the story here, and she obviously is a big defender of CEQA and the most important thing she wants to preserve is the public's input in that process.

"What she intends to do, overall," spokeswoman Teala Schaff added, "is to streamline the process so that it's more user-friendly, less expensive, more transparent, to speed up the process."

Also working on a CEQA bill are state Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D) and state Senate Environmental Quality Chairman Michael Rubio (D). Rubio said he and Senate leadership are looking for "areas that we agree are important components of CEQA that we should preserve, because it has served us well, and there's many of them over the last 40 years." They also will be conferring on "areas that have been abused that we can work on."

Rubio said he wants to prohibit CEQA lawsuits that cite other federal, state and local environmental and land-use laws as long as projects comply with those laws. "Too many times, a project that has met all of the environmental requirements is unfairly delayed or even killed by a lawsuit," he wrote in an op-ed Sunday in The Sacramento Bee.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, want to leave CEQA as the last line of defense against damaging development.

"I can see a scenario where there would be some horse trading over what goes into a bill," said David Pettit, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Southern California air program.

Of Rubio's plan to limit CEQA's scope to areas not covered by other environmental laws, Pettit said, "We're just not going to go there."

A goal for environmentalists in the CEQA fight is to gain ground on climate change. A state court decision last year found a Los Angeles developer didn't have to account under the law for the effects of sea-level rise on a real estate project -- an impact that Pettit and others say must be assessed.

Meanwhile, environmentalists and development interests are sparring over how the law's impacts on development are perceived by the public. NRDC and the California League of Conservation Voters released an analysis yesterday showing about 1 percent of projects that have to comply with CEQA actually draw lawsuits, about 200 cases per year.

Jennifer Hernandez, an attorney at the law firm Holland & Knight, disputed NRDC's characterization of the rates of lawsuits. About half the developers that get sued lose, she said. "Where there's controversy, projects get sued," she said. "I think the question raised is, 'Is there a problem,' and the answer for [environmentalists] is no. ... I just don't think that's a perception that's shared by elected and appointed officials who've had to work with CEQA."

Environmentalists do concede the law could be tweaked. "There's a lot of ways that CEQA can be improved that no one will disagree with," said Kathryn Phillips, executive director of Sierra Club California.

Another environmentalist said areas of agreement on CEQA reform might be too narrow to satisfy people clamoring for wider reforms.

"I don't think that the things we're willing to offer, and the other side would like, I don't think that's what's going to make the development interests happy," said Bruce Reznik, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League, which held a conference on CEQA last weekend at the University of California, Davis. "They're looking for something much more substantial than that."

He added: "I don't know that you can find something that gets to a lot of the core issues ... where you don't have one side or the other still really pissed off."

Reporter Anne C. Mulkern contributed.