Gavin Newsom’s ‘CEQA Reform’ is Gift to Labor Unions, & not affordable housing – Fake News

California’s absurdly strict environmental guidelines and restrictions prevent most large scale projects from ever taking place without legislative intervention. Instead the California Legislature makes annual noise about the need for CEQA reforms, but always kills any sincere attempts at real reform.

This has been going on for decades proving there is no real interest in enacting CEQA reforms, but it makes great headlines.

Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed he signed “historic legislation to cut red tape, cut through unnecessary CEQA delays, and build more housing faster for Californians.”

Sadly, Gov. Newsom’s so-called CEQA “reform” must be debunked. We’ve been waiting many many years for real reforms to be made to the California Environmental Quality Act, which drives the cost of any construction in California way up.

“I just enacted the most game-changing housing reforms in recent California history,” Gov. Newsom claimed.

Newsom’s claim is fake news – it’s not reform – the CEQA regulations are only going to be lifted for labor union construction. Non-union contractors don’t qualify for CEQA reform.

Yet the vast majority of construction workers in California are nonunion.

A good friend of the Globe, Jon Fleischman of the Flash Report, jumped on Newsom’s claim immediately with “Another Union Takeover – This Time Buried In Housing Bills.“

“You would have to dig into the fine print of legislation signed yesterday to see how non-union business owners and workers got screwed, again.”

Another good friend of the Globe Lance Christensen also weighed in on Newsom’s dubious claims of CEQA reform:

Translation: For the 7 years I’ve been governor, I did the bidding of environmentalists and unions and blocked the ability of people to build homes in California. Now I signed a bill that the news outlets are going to mimic my talking points of “major reforms” that does nothing of the sort. Just like the expedited housing permits in burned out LA…

As the Associated Builders and Contractors clarifies, “the vast majority of construction workers in California choose to work free from union representation, with new data revealing that more than 87% of the state’s private construction workforce is nonunion.”

So the vast majority of contractors in California will not be granted contracts to build “affordable housing,” and the housing that will be built by union labor won’t be affordable.

Fleischman continues:

AB 130 strikes at the heart of competitive free enterprise in California. The bill creates new CEQA exemptions for infill housing developments that meet local zoning and planning standards, but the devil lives in the details, which most media outlets ignore. Section 25 of the legislation exempts housing projects from environmental review while imposing minimum wage requirements and prevailing wage rates on developments that were never subject to these costly mandates—a costly mandate in a bill that purports to make it easier to build housing.

Lance Christensen explains CEQA in this Epoch Times article from March:

Viewed as the Holy Grail of environmental policy, CEQA was signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970 in an attempt to allow public input into large government projects. However, a half-century later, numerous lawsuits and ever-evolving legislation have metastasized into a matrix of dizzying regulation and “green tape,” as it were. CEQA is now a major roadblock to building anything in the state, including houses, businesses, hospitals, schools, and factories.

At its core, the law requires state and local agencies to identify significant environmental effects of a project and to avoid or mitigate those effects, if feasible. However, these regulations’ costs often outweigh their benefits and cannot be justified in a business plan. It makes building or rebuilding anything larger than a lemonade stand impossible without navigating endless bureaucratic gobbledygook that may not improve environmental outcomes.

Promises of CEQA reforms from the ruling party have been promised for decades. In 2012, I wrote about just one of those attempts:

Despite promises to pass desperately needed reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act, lawmakers in the state Senate killed the CEQA reform bill co-authored by Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, R-Thousand Oaks.

“The CEQA reform effort that I co-authored was unceremoniously killed today by Senate Democrats, postponing any action till next year,” Gorell posted on Facebook. “Gov. Brown needs to show at least a modicum of leadership on this issue if he truly supports CEQA reform as he states.”

Instead, the Legislature’s practice of passing bills that exempt CEQA for specific projects is Democrats’ preferred way to address the issue. In 2011, lawmakers pushed through two bills at ramrod speed, which expedited the required legal review of any potential CEQA-related court challenges.

The first bill was the proposed downtown Los Angeles football stadium, and the second bill authorized exemptions to selected projects with costs of $100 million or more.

And in 2013, a bill authored by then-Sen. Pres. Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, granting a Sacramento arena development an exemption from the state’s strict environmental laws, greased the skids. 

Steinberg insisted at the time that he was only trying to reform the California Environmental Quality Act.

SB 743, is a gut-and-amend bill by Steinberg is titled, “Environmental quality: transit oriented infill projects, judicial review streamlining for environmental leadership development projects, and entertainment and sports center in the City of Sacramento.”

That’s the long way of saying this is not really a CEQA reform bill. It’s a face-saving way out for Steinberg who has been awkwardly intertwined for more than 13 years with the haphazard development of a new sports arena in downtown Sacramento.

After Sacramento officials accelerated approval on this latest arena deal in March, I contacted Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and asked if he planned on authoring legislation to streamline or bypass the required environmental process for the proposed Sacramento arena. Steinberg’s office denied any plan for a CEQA exemption. However, in order to shoehorn the publicly subsidized arena into downtown Sacramento, this had to be in the cards.

California’s absurdly strict environmental guidelines and restrictions prevent most large scale projects from ever taking place without legislative intervention. But instead of choosing certain projects for exemption, the California Legislature made noise about the need for CEQA reforms, but thus far, has killed any sincere attempts at real reform.