The Law We Built Is Under Attack. Some of the Criticism Is Fair.

One of CLIPI's early cases, Friends of Mammoth, established that the California Environmental Quality Act applied to private development projects.

The No Oil and Bozung cases spread its reach even wider. Together, these cases made CEQA the foundation of environmental review in California.

Now CEQA is again under fire. Critics point to cases where environmental review has been used to block affordable housing projects and childcare centers. Environmental review of large infrastructure projects, renewable energy projects, and even habitat restoration projects drag on for years and become easy targets for lawsuits by NIMBYs and extremists of all sorts. Critics argue that the law has become an obstacle to building the things California desperately needs.

As Loyola Law Professor Dan Selmi has observed, the problem is that we haven't done well at re-examining these 1970s laws to see how they fit today. For too long CEQA has functioned as a broad protective measure without distinguishing between a water park proposed next to Lake Tahoe and an infill housing project in an urban neighborhood.

Those are fundamentally different situations, and the law should treat them differently.

The solution isn't to gut CEQA. The foundation it established, that environmental impacts must be examined before decisions are made, remains sound.

But we need to be honest about where environmental review adds value and where it creates obstacles to outcomes we all want.