California’s primary environmental legislation, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), mandates disclosure of the harmful impacts of a project on surrounding environmental conditions. CEQA requires that alternatives be proposed to mitigate those effects on the environment. Although CEQA has long been considered a staple of California’s environmental policy, it has often been critiqued by developers for impeding development and delaying projects with lawsuits that can persist for years.
One of the most recent controversies to envelop CEQA involves a loophole that allows wealthy developers to spend large sums of money to receive exemption from CEQA mandated requirements. Several developers have succeeded in gaining approval for their projects in short periods of time without undergoing a comprehensive environmental review under CEQA. One such project was the approval of an 80,000 seat stadium for the Los Angeles Rams. It took a mere six weeks from the time the developer presented the plans to securing final approval from the Inglewood City Council.
A California state lawmaker, Assemblyman Jose Medina, has drafted Assembly Bill 890 to prevent developers from continuing to sidestep legally mandated environmental review requirements. The process by which the Rams and other developers have been able to forego mandatory review procedures reveals a significant loophole in CEQA legislation. Essentially, when a developer releases his plans, he can announce a ballot measure to obtain signatures from the voters in the local community. When a development is approved by the requisite number of voters, then it is not required to undergo the CEQA review process. In the case of the Rams stadium, after the initiative received enough signatures to warrant a public vote, the Inglewood City Council avoided the voting process and approved the plan on its own.
AB 890 mandates that all developers undergo full CEQA review and prohibits local authorities from approving these projects unilaterally without a public vote. The bill is intended to stop developers with substantial financial resources from being able to launch elaborate ballot initiatives and to mitigate the effects of large scale spending on local campaigns to elect officials who will support developer projects. Still, the ballot initiative has not always been successful for developers as some have lost approval through a subsequent referendum.
Contact Shane Coons at 949-333-0900 or visit his website at www.ShaneCoonsLaw.com to find out more about his practice.