Powerful Interests Aim to Weaken California’s Landmark Environmental Law

Political action committees funded by technology companies, the state’s major utilities and other corporate interests have spent nearly twice as much to pass a ballot measure that would greenlight major development projects with minimal environmental or public review as public interest and labor groups have spent opposing it.

Developers and other corporate interests aim to streamline the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which requires public agencies to identify, disclose and mitigate a development project’s negative impacts on a wide range of environmental resources, including wildlife, air and water quality and tribal cultural resources. 

Proposition 45 shifts who determines the scope of environmental review from public agencies and communities to project developers by rewriting the state’s foundational environmental law to fast-track major projects.

Supporters of Prop 45, sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce, have spent more than $56 million to pass the measure, the most recent state records show. Opponents, led by a coalition of more than 550 labor, health and environmental organizations, have spent close to $30 million to defeat what they say will give polluters a free pass.

“Prop 45 will modernize the approval process for essential projects by establishing clear, enforceable timelines for agency decisions and court challenges,” the chamber said in promotional materials, “while keeping environmental protections intact and preserving worker protections, tribal protections and local control.”

Critics say Prop 45 will gut the state’s primary vehicle for allowing people to learn about plans for polluting developments in their neighborhoods and propose alternatives.

“It undermines basically every stage of that process,” said Woody Little, the spokesperson for No on Prop 45. 

Little and his allies say the 41-page ballot measure was written by corporations who have paid to get their special interests on the ballot to create loopholes that favor polluting industries like recently regulated data centers while limiting the input of communities and local tribes.

Critics of CEQA, signed in 1970 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, blame the law for hobbling home construction and driving housing and cost of living increases in California, which are among the highest in the nation.

Prop 45 will lower housing and utility costs by reducing “endless” bureaucratic delays and protect taxpayers by reducing waste and cost overruns, Yes on Prop 45 materials argue.

Yet there is no requirement in the measure to reduce housing costs or utility bills. And the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that Prop 45 could leave state and local governments paying $100 million or more a year, partly to cover fast-tracked projects’ environmental impacts.

“The housing issue is a smokescreen for all these other polluting projects,” said Little. 

California passed laws last year that significantly streamlined CEQA by exempting urban and mixed-use housing construction from its provisions as well as certain infrastructure and clean energy projects. 

“I would hope that 100 percent of Californians would see this radical reshaping of California’s environmental law for the dangerous thing that it is. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

— Woody Little, No on Prop 45

None of the grassroots groups that promote “yes in my backyard,” or YIMBY, policies to build more housing and public transit in urban and suburban areas support Prop 45, Little said. Most are neutral, he said, while others oppose it. 

Expanding housing beyond already developed areas means building new freeways, water connections and other expensive infrastructure that taxpayers ultimately pay for, Little said. And these projects often encroach on the wildland-urban interface, raising wildfire risk just as climate change is making fires more destructive.

At a time when California is already seeing the catastrophic costs of climate-fueled fires, Little said, the state should be requiring more environmental review around developments to assess and mitigate risk, not less.

What’s “Essential”?

Prop 45 covers nine types of “essential” projects, among them housing, water systems, clean energy (including carbon capture and storage), transportation, wildfire risk reduction and broadband internet access. All related and “ancillary” infrastructure is also covered.

Whether “ancillary” includes data centers, which typically require broadband infrastructure, has been a major point of contention.

Prop 45’s proponents have insisted the measure does not cover data centers, but legal experts disagree, pointing to $2 million in donations from just three data center builders and language buried in the measure’s 41 pages. Eligible projects include “broadband internet access projects,” defined as “mass-market retail service … that provides the capability to transmit data to, and receive data from, all or substantially all Internet endpoints,” a recent analysis found.

That definition includes facilities that house the physical infrastructure used to transmit consumer data to and from the internet—which describes many data centers. 

Yet data centers are conspicuously absent from the list of excluded controversial projects, which includes high-speed rail, the Delta Conveyance Project, nuclear power and oil and gas facilities.

Inside Climate News asked the Yes on Prop 45 campaign why it sought to further limit environmental review after California had already significantly streamlined CEQA and why the measure does not explicitly exclude data centers. The campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

California Resources Corp., the state’s largest oil and gas producer, has donated $500,000 directly to Prop 45 campaigns and another $500,000 to a business committee sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce. Oil and gas facilities are explicitly excluded from Prop 45, but CRC has a data center under environmental review at its Elk Hills oil field. 

CRC did not respond to questions about whether it supports Prop 45 in order to fast-track its data center application.

Protecting Community Voices

“Proposition 45 would weaken CEQA protections for the very projects that still warrant careful scrutiny—development that could put people in harm’s way, fragment wildlife habitat, threaten water resources or damage irreplaceable cultural and sacred sites,” environmental and conservation leaders argued in a recent op-ed.

One of the op-ed authors, Chris Wilmers, tracks mountain lions as lead researcher for the Santa Cruz Puma Project. In his study area, retaliatory killings for preying on domestic animals and vehicle strikes are the biggest threat to mountain lions as new housing and roads continue to encroach on the wide-ranging carnivores’ critical habitat. 

CEQA requires developers to weigh alternatives to mitigate harm if new evidence emerges that a project would degrade critical wildlife corridors or endangered species’ habitat. But such facts would never come to light under Prop 45, which lets developers write their own rules, Wilmers and others say.

And the ballot measure strips away the rights of tribes that aren’t recognized by the federal government to safeguard their sacred lands.

That leaves large swaths of California, including the Central Coast, the San Francisco Bay Area and much of the Los Angeles area, without any tribal representation, said Noelle Chambers, executive director of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.

Ethnographic studies conducted through CEQA consultations allowed the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to protect burial grounds, artifacts and other sacred sites by stopping a proposed sand and gravel mine near Gilroy. 

Prop 45 creates a “really harmful” legal precedent in the state by excluding non-federally recognized tribes from the process, Chambers said.

Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, calls Prop 45 “a blunt force instrument” that is unlikely to build more projects faster by removing public participation.

It will cause a real loss of community engagement, she said, noting that CEQA is the only avenue for environmental justice communities to influence the environmental impacts of projects in their neighborhoods. 

“We lived through a big infrastructure build-out in this country without laws like CEQA in the 1950s and ’60s, and we got environmental justice communities right next to freeways as a result,” Stein said. 

CEQA has helped many communities with elevated rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease and other ailments linked to industrial pollution limit additional harms in their neighborhoods. 

A historically overburdened Latino community in southeast Los Angeles used a court order to compel a local government to review the risks of building an elementary school on a site contaminated with arsenic, and likely lead and asbestos, and require a cleanup. The mostly Latino residents of Riverside County’s Moreno Valley won an agreement to mitigate the harms on local air quality, climate and wildlife created by heavy-duty trucks serving a 40-million-square-foot warehouse. 

Such mitigating measures might never have been identified, let alone required, if Prop 45 had been in effect, opponents say.

In addition to reducing the timeline for public agencies to review projects and fundamentally changing who can provide input, Prop 45 says only the developer or corporation can propose alternatives, said Mabel Tsang, political director for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, which opposes Prop 45. 

“That takes away the strongest tool that communities like ours can use to protect ourselves from the worst health impacts before another polluting project is approved next door to our homes,” Tsang said.

Reagan, who signed CEQA as California governor but was known for accelerating deregulation as president, saw environmental protection as a nonpartisan issue. “Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it’s common sense,” he said during his 1984 State of the Union address. 

Now, on the heels of the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back the nation’s major environmental laws, experts say CEQA is more important than ever to safeguard public health and the environment from polluting industries.

Recent polling suggests that on Nov. 3, voters may not approve a measure designed to kneecap California’s most important air- and water-quality protection law. 

A poll released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California shows that 50 percent of voters oppose Prop 45, while those who support it dropped to 46 percent from 73 percent in July, when voters knew only general information about the proposition. 

“I would hope that 100 percent of Californians would see this radical reshaping of California’s environmental law for the dangerous thing that it is,” said No on Prop 45’s Little. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”