SACRAMENTO, California — California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers on Monday agreed to limit the scope of one of the state’s preeminent environmental rules in a last-minute budget deal.
Lawmakers passed a trailer budget bill on Monday exempting a wide array of projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, including wildfire fuel breaks, water system upgrades, portions of the high-speed rail project, and advanced manufacturing facilities like semiconductor and EV plants.
Environmental groups were apoplectic. “They’re conditioning the funding of essential services like health care, education, to this huge policy change that would dramatically roll back environmental review for some of the most polluting facilities in California,” said Asha Sharma, the state policy director of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
It’s the latest — and one of the most consequential — turns in Sacramento’s years-long trend of poking holes in CEQA, a foundational 1970s-era law requiring construction projects to not only analyze their environmental impacts, as federal law also requires, but address those impacts. Environmentalists defend the law as essential and pro-growth advocates deride it as an obstruction to critical housing, infrastructure and industrial development.
