The CEQA Conundrum: Navigating Reform and Progress in California

Unpacking CEQA Reform: Matt Regan Joins Jared Asch on the Capstone Conversation

In our latest Capstone Conversation, host Jared Asch dives into the intricate world of California's Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) reform with insightful guest Matt Regan from the Bay Area Council. The discussion unravels the complexities of CEQA, its history, its impact on development in California, and the much-needed reform aimed at striking a balance between environmental stewardship and growth.

Understanding CEQA and Its Impact

CEQA was initially signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970 as a response to rampant environmental degradation. The law mandates extensive environmental impact analysis for projects, covering 21 areas of study, from aesthetics to tribal resources. This rigorous process, however, has led to significant delays, increased costs, and numerous lawsuits, hindering progress and contributing to California's housing crisis.

The Challenges of CEQA

As Matt Regan explains, CEQA’s broad application and the ease of filing lawsuits have made it a tool for stalling projects, often used by businesses and labor unions for competitive or strategic advantages. This has resulted in urban sprawl and a housing deficit, pushing development to less environmentally friendly areas and causing significant inconvenience for project sponsors.

The Path to Reform

Recent efforts in reforming CEQA were highlighted, including the introduction of legislative bills SB 131 and AB 130, aiming to streamline permit processes and curb unnecessary litigation. The conversation highlights the importance of these reforms, which aim to promote a more sustainable and inclusive growth model in California, without compromising environmental stewardship.

Economic Implications

Jared and Matt discuss the economic and demographic consequences of California’s stringent CEQA regulations, particularly highlighting the migration of residents to states like Texas due to affordable housing shortages. This exodus not only impacts California’s political representation but also shifts environmental burdens, as states like Texas have less stringent greenhouse gas regulations.

Looking Ahead: Advice for Leaders

In conclusion, Matt Regan urges city and state leaders to reconsider their priorities and adopt a more balanced approach combining economic growth, social equity, and environmental stewardship. Only through such a balanced strategy can California regain its status as a desirable and sustainable place to live.

Stay Connected

To keep up with more insights and discussions on important issues affecting the Greater East Bay, subscribe to the Capstone Conversation for weekly updates and catch new episodes every Wednesday.

Below are some hashtags related to this topic:

1. #CEQAReform

2. #CaliforniaHousing

3. #EnvironmentalPolicy

4. #UrbanDevelopment

5. #BayAreaCouncil

6. #SustainableGrowth

7. #HousingCrisis

8. #UrbanSprawl

9. #LegalChallenges

10. #CaliforniaPolitics

11. #GreenEconomy

12. #PolicyReform

13. #EnvironmentalStewardship

14. #SmartGrowth

15. #AffordableHousing

16. #GreenhouseGas

17. #Legislation

18. #ProgressivePolicy

19. #CommunityDevelopment

20. #EastBayUpdates

For the Full Transcript of our interview together.

Welcome to the Capstone conversation where you learn about what's happening in the Greater East Bay. I am your host, Jared Asch.

  today we're gonna look at CEQA reform, understanding what is CEQA, why does it need to get reform, the good and the bad about it, along with the history. So today we are joined by Matt Regan from the Bay Area Council. Matt has. Spent his career focused on not as an attorney doing land use issues, but as a policy person studying CEQA and what it needs to happen and its challenges.

Matt, tell us a little bit more about your background.

Thanks Jared, and thanks for the invitation to come talk to you today. I work at the Bay Area Council. We are a, an employer sponsored public policy advocacy organization. Our basic mission is to make the Bay Area the best place in the world to live and work.

We focus on areas that are challenging for our residents and our employers. Housing affordability, transportation, congestion, energy, reliability, water reliability, climate change, workforce. All of the major drivers of what makes this plaCEQA success, but also. What makes it difficult to live here and challenging to live here, the cost of living, all of that stuff.

So we look at it from a high altitude and from a 360 degree perspective and looking at, what are the principle drivers of innovation here? How can we continue and maintain our preeminenCEQAs the global leader in all things innovation. While trying to be sustainable, while trying to be affordable, while trying to be a place where, ordinary people can afford to live.

It's we're trying to have cake eat it and all at the same time. Yeah, that's basically it's not an easy job, but it's, but it keeps us busy.

I'll point out that Jim Wonderman, longtime CEO of the Bay Area Council was on, I think as one of the first 10 episodes of this podcast.

So if you're interested in learning more about them and his thoughts on the Bay Area more broadly, go check that episode out. Matt, tell us what is CEQAl? Let's start with. Define it for the people who don't know it. Some people are familiar with it at high levels. Some people know it in the weeds but give us an overview.

CEQA is the California Environmental CEQAlity Act, CEQA. And it was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970. And it was a well intended and much needed response to a lot of environment, environmental degradation that we saw across the nation, in the forties, fifties, sixties.

Rivers catching fire in Pittsburgh, et cetera. And this was California's response to to those challenges. There were, we did experienCEQAuite, quite a lot of rampant and unregulated industrial activity primarily that resulted in some pretty serious negative environmental consequences. So there was a need.

For a mechanism to to regulate activities that had an environmental impact. It's sister law, if you will, is nepa the National Environmental Protection Act. And between them, they require CEQA in particular is a higher standard than nepa. And CEQA requires. Any project that is considered to have an environmental impact under, it's got I think 21 separate areas of study has to analyze for those impacts mitigate for those impacts, and if they can't mitigate for those impacts there for the most part, denied permits.

CEQA is triggered by discretionary review. It's triggered by a governmental decision. So if someone needs governmental approval for a particular activity or project it's generally then going to become subject to CEQA analysis. The original objective of CEQA was just to be applied to public projects, rail lines, road expansions new schools and libraries, all of that stuff would be subject to CEQA analysis and review.

Shortly after the passage of CA and the signing of CEQA into law there was a case called Friends of Mammoth versus, and California. And it. Expanded CEQA to not just apply to public projects, but to private projects that required public approval. So that was the first massive expansion of CEQA.

It really, CEQA's original scope and focus was quite narrow. And this legal case expanded it to just about everything. The courts have always taken, since the early seventies have taken a very expansive approach to CEQA. And we've seen the reach of CEQA grow exponentially over the years.

Primarily driven by court decisions. The courts have been very deferential to CEQA. And have allowed it to expand in, into areas that the original drafters of the law, I don't think ever expected or wanted. So today, se a is a ubiquitous eight legged monster I would call it a 21 legged monster.

There, as I say, there are 21 areas of separate study from aesthetics to air, to water, to tribal resources, public services. Seismic mineral resources, I could go on and a project sponsor when if they're forced to do an environmental impact report under CEQA has to analyze for, has to hire a consultant, a mineral consultant, an air CEQAlity consultant, a tribal resources consultant, a traffic consultant.

So if you want to build, an apartment. Project in, in a city in Contra Costa County, you have to hire consultants to do all of this analysis, and it takes a couple of years and it's very expensive. And the principal problem with CEQA. Is that all of these things, it's you're essentially asking the project sponsor to predict the future.

What is the impact of my project going to be when I cut the ribbon? Not today, but when it's when my apartment building, for example, is occupied with people and they're driving to work and they're going to school and they're using public services. What will the impact be then? Not today, but in 5, 6, 7 years when the building is occupied.

So you're asking a project sponsor to predict the future. So it's a very let's just say it's a it's quite a gray area and it's a, it's an area that's, that lacks a great deal of certainty. So in, in this incredibly litigious society in which we live, anybody who's subject to a law that has, that requires you to predict the future in, in, in a very fuzzy way, you're going to get sued a lot.

That has been the principle challenge with CEQA. So I'll use a, a case study example was one of my favorites. So Planned Parenthood pulled permits a number of years ago to expand their clinic in South San Francisco. And they were immediately sued by a local conservative church under the noise provisions of CEQAA.

So they were like, okay let's see what the, what this challenge is. So the church across the street filed a CEQAA challenge saying You have failed to adeCEQAtely analyze the noise that will be created by our daily protests outside your gates. And it held the project up by six to seven months as it went through the court.

Fortunately the court threw it out, but it held the project up. They had to go to court, they had to hire lawyers. They had, because of this incredibly spurious and ridiculous legal challenge. But that's the sort of the meek grinder we throw pretty much every large project into these days and expose them to all sorts of ridiculous litigation.

And I mentioned the friends of Mammoth and the. The it's important to notice the friends of Mammoth name sequel litigants, do not have to disclose their identity to the court. So someone in San Diego can sue a project in Redding and call themselves the friends of the Forest of Redding and not disclose who they are, where their money's coming from, or the reason for their litigation.

They, it can be done completely anonymously. So you do get a lot of these crazy lawsuits, friends of this, cheerleaders for that. And you really don't know who's filing the lawsuit. There's a great analysis that was done a couple of years ago by a law firm, Holland and Knight it's called in the name of the environment where they did a study of all the CEQAL lawsuits that have been filed since 1970.

And the vast majority of them are filed anonymously. Only 4% I believe were. Filed by recognized environmental organizations, the vast ma, because the C, the standards for litigation are so low and the opportunity to leverage a project. And the project sponsors are so you, so easy. You get examples where and everybody's guilty of this.

This is not one community being guilty of it o over another. So businesses suing other businesses. Another example was of a gas station in San Jose a number of years ago, sued a neighboring gas station that pulled permits to add a couple of pumps. It was just, it was a purely competitive move.

You'll get examples where Target will sue Costco and Walmart will sue Target when they pull permits to open a new store just to delay it as long as possible to maintain a competitive advantage. So businesses suing other businesses. Labor unions suing for project labor agreements. They will go to a developer and say, if you wanna build that apartment project you better sign a project labor agreement and hire union labor.

And the developer will say I don't have to under the law. The. Union will say good luck. We're gonna sue you under a noise ordinance or an air CEQAlity ordinance that we, and we'll keep you in court for years. Delay your project. It'll cost you $5 million in legal fees and delays.

A PLA will only cost you 4 million in, additional labor costs. The developer will do one of two things. They will pay the additional $4 million in labor costs, or they will just fold up their tent and leave. And unfortunately for us in California. We've seen much too much of that, of folding up tents and leaving.

And that's why one of the principle reasons we have a housing crisis. And then of course you have good old-fashioned NIMBYs. When you give the opponents of any kind of progress, any kind of change, this sort of steel hammer to stop to stop any kind of change they will use it. And so you quite regularly see lawsuits filed against really good projects, really important projects just by one or two cranky neighbors who who don't want it to happen.

The, we're suing ourselves in California. We ask why government is so inefficient and why high speed rail, 25 years after, we passed the bonds, we're still looking at, a fraction of a project built and we're still going through environmental analysis for certain.

It's like people have lost faith and trust in the ability government to deliver anything in large part because. They have to go through the same meat grinder of environmental analysis as private sector projects and nothing gets done. CEQA has definitely been a major contributor to slowing down and stopping progress in California.

I'll get off my soapbox in a second and close with this. I, when people challenge me and say, CEQA a's important, it's good for the environment. It's it helps manage our land use and planning and and helps responsible growth and development.

That, that's what CEQA is designed for. And that's what it does. I will just challenge anybody on that premise to look out their window. Now you've probably noticed I have a bit of an accent. I moved from Ireland to San Francisco in 1994, and I remember the first time I drove to the state capitol in Sacramento for work, and I 80 was a series of communities you would drive through, Vacaville and Fairfield and Dixon and Davis, and they were clearly defined communities.

You drive that road today and it's, everything bleeds into everything. It's a blur. We have developed in a very horizontal manner in California. Since the passage of CEQA, the populations of our cities have been stagnant. Our, the population of Berkeley in 1950 is the same as it is today.

Meanwhile the population of California has CEQAdrupled. It's increased 400%. All of our population growth has been absorbed by suburbs and excerpts. Se a has forced development into places where we profess we don't want it to be. I was, I always like to say Seq under SCEQA development follows the path of least resistance.

The least resistance is where people don't live because people file S QL lawsuits. So if you don't want a S QL lawsuit, go to San Joaquin County and p play over some almond orchards and build some subdivisions of auto dependent, long mega commuters. You won't faCEQA sCEQA challenge, but try to build a project in San Francisco where Berkeley and Oakland and you will get sued under CEQA.

So just your eyes will not betray you. Just look at how California has developed under c qa. It has been the antithesis of what we profess to want as stewards of the environment. We have developed horizontally, low density auto dependent communities to the horizon, and our cities have remained relatively stagnant in terms of population growth and change.

CEQA should have standards for cities and standards for areas where we want to protect and preserve secret treats them both the same. So in cities and urban areas. You're much more likely to get sued than in these suburban and exurban areas that we profess to want to protect. So the truth lies in, in, in reality.

And if you look at the state and where we've grown, it has not been in the places that have transit, that have jobs that are walkable. It is in the places that are auto dependent and far flung and as far away from jobs as we can get 'em. I, again, if you wanna argue the merits of CEQAL all day long, I'll just take, look at the evidence.

Look at how California has developed under CEQAL, and that's why we need reform.

Wow. So a lot to unpack there. A couple of questions stand out. First, just I'll define NIMBY is for those of you who don't know it listening, it's not in my backyard. People who don't want, construction projects, more housing in their neighborhood.

I'm going through that in, in an area in Walnut Creek where people are concerned about town homes taking over an office park. But actually the transit studies show that's actually less traffic because you have less in and out and at different times of day. I wanna talk about, how easy it is to file these lawsuits and delay things.

One thing is price. It's practically free, low dollar to at least initiate this and create delays in CEQA. Can you talk about that barrier entry to even file the suit?

Yeah. I, someone will correct me I don't know the exact numbers, but I leave, it's something like 500 bucks to file a sequel lawsuit.

And then as soon as you, as soon as you hit that button. The project stops and time is money. When people ask, why is it so expensive to build in California versus other states? The construction materials cost the same in California as they do in Texas. Why are, why is it a million dollars a door to build a housing unit in California when they can build that same housing unit in Texas for $350,000?

What's, where's the rub? What's the, what's creating this huge delta and in, in large part it's process. It's legal challenges, it's process, and it's uncertainty. The lack of certainty is really expensive if you're a real estate investor. So let's say for example, large apartment developers, even affordable housing developers, they use public pension funds, teachers pension funds, SEI use pension funds.

They're large investors in real estate and large investors in in the construction of new homes. In California because the failure rate for housing projects is so high. So when you invest a whole bunch of money up front, that first tranche of money that goes into a project and architecture and engineering and site plans and CEQA consultants and lawyers that's high risk money.

So the first tranche of money, your chances of losing that are quite high in California compared to other states where the failure rate for housing projects is much, much lower. Investors require higher rates of return in California because the risks are higher. The risk of losing your money is higher in California.

So these funds these institutional fund investors require higher rates of return. That's just one reason why the costs are here are that much higher. We've made it uncertain. We have made it costly. We have made it lengthy. And we've made it litigious, and these things cost money.

We need to find that goldilock zone, that balance between environmental stewardship and protection and allowing good projects to move ahead in a timely and efficient fashion. We have aired on the side of extreme caution. Nothing shall proceed until we have examined everything to the nth degree and mitigated everything to zero and made sure that there are absolutely no impacts on anything ever.

And that's not how the world works. And we have essentially cast ourselves in, in, in amber. And there shall be no change. Nothing shall shall be altered and. That's, that's great if you're an existing homeowner and you've owned your home since the seventies. And we're, we continue to create jobs in California with our innovation economy, but with no new homes.

That means that there's increasing competition for the existing housing. Stock prices keep going up and up, and the Bay Area has essentially become a gated country club and the price of admissions a million and a half dollars to buy a home. Good luck getting getting an entry level.

You mentioned town homes, Jared, town homes are the new entry level housing stock. They're what pencils or they're, what developers can afford to build multifamily podium type housing. 4, 5, 6 stories that's become cost prohibitive to build. It is. From a density perspective, it is preferable when you're, when you have large transit investments like BART stations, et cetera you want to have as many people living adjacent to those investments as possible.

But we've made it cost prohibitive to build multifamily and god forbid, condos. We can touch that third rail if you want. But multifamily apartments, we've made it cost prohibitive to build those for a whole bunch of reasons. So my town homes are really all the pencils and even, and as you're experiencing with your project, it's, people are up in arms against those.

So it's I call 'em progressives against progress. There are two different kinds of NIMBYs. There are left NIMBYs and there are right NIMBYs, left NIMBYs, the Progressives against progress. They, their attitude towards CEQA is. A misguided attitude around, it's here to protect our environment from rapacious developers and those who would, profit from the destruction of our environment.

I'll just say, open your eyes and look at how we have developed and argue with me that it has been a good thing. Then, and they also say if you want these streamlining measures, if you want CEQA exemptions, or if you want to fast track through CEQA, then you have to give us things like below market rate units, BMR, affordable units.

So this has been the bane of CEQA reform efforts in the past. We have had success in the past, bills like SB 35. AB 2011 that have created streamlining provisions to make it, for projects we profess to want the types of things we profess to want, like infill housing next to transit. We as a society have said, we want this.

This is good for the environment. We want to densify our cities, so let's create sequence streamlining for these types of projects. So we created, we passed laws again, SB 35, AB 2011, and others. But we attached requirements to those laws, or if you want to use this CEQA streamlining measure, you have to do 20% affordable on site.

So let's take that as an example. If a developer has to do 20% of their of their project at a below market rate price point that makes the project much less financially feasible. Imagine if Safeway had to give away 20% of their produCEQAt below market. Below what they paid the farmer for it.

If Chevron had to give away 20% of the gasoline at the gas station at below market rate below, what it cost them to refine it they wouldn't be in business for very long. But we require developers to do that. Builders of housing, you have to give, in order to get this streamlining provision, you have to give 20% away at below market rate.

By the way, you then you also have to use union labor the debate around what the cost multiplier is for union labor is robust. The general consensus is it's somewhere between 10 and 30%. It's still a large cost driver that, can break the back of a lot of projects.

So in the past when we've recognized that CEQA is a problem for certain much wanted types of development, we've attached these expensive requirements to it, which have made them infeasible to actually use. And, one person CEQA a proponent that is much smarter than me. Call called these provisions.

Que unicorns. We talk about these streamlining provisions a lot, but nobody's ever seen one in real life because developers don't use them. They can't use them. They're just too expensive. So for the first time in this last, in this current legislative session and the focus of today's conversation, we had SB 1 31 and AB one 30.

These were budget trailer bills that the governor put in the budget. To create sequence streamlining provisions with no strings attached. For good things. The types of projects we desperately need as a state we desperately need as a society that have been hung up in litigation for years. And we're starting to get them now.

We will start to get them. The law went into effect immediately in June when the governor signed the budget. We're going to start hopefully seeing more of the types of projects we profess to want and we desperately need because we created streamlining provisions without strings attached.

These two bills, SB one one 1 31 and AB one 30 were inserted into the budget. But prior to their insertion in the budget, they were active. Bills in the legislature was SB 6 0 7 by Senator Scott Wiener and sb AB 6 0 9 by assembly member Buffy Wicks.

Those were both billed, sponsored by the Bay Area Council. My employer. We have been working on sCEQA reform for a very long time. I jokingly call s word reform job security. For the first time in really since the passage of SCEQA in 1970, we've seen meaningful reform, a meaningful efforts to make seq into what it's the original framers of the law wanted it to be a law that genuinely protects.

What we value in our environment, but allowing the type of development that we need in the places where we profess to want it. You those two pieces of legislation that were in, in the budget. I have great hope for that. We will start to see the tide turn on the sprawl and the auto dependent types of development that we've seen for years in California.

I wanna talk about population. 'cause you talked about population in many of these cities being stagnant and California as a whole has paused and growing in the last few years.

And especially definitely not growing at the rate of other states. And that's because people can't find housing. It's not about the jobs, it's about good CEQAlity affordable housing and I use the lowercase a 'cause I'm talking middle class.

We lost one congressional seat this time around.

I've seen projections that California could lose two more congressional seats. Talk about the politics and the impact of the no population growth compared to other states that are growing.

That's a great question, Jared. And I can take a half hour to unpack it, but I'll try to be as concise as possible.

40,000 people every single year leave California for one state, Texas. Look at the census data, and that's just to one state. They're leaving for other states too, but 40,000 a year are leaving for Texas, and as you correctly point out, it's not for. Higher paying jobs. It's certainly not for lower taxes because California's got the most progressive tax system in the nation.

Lower income people pay essentially no taxes. In California and Texas. They pay much higher than they do here. They are leaving for affordable and available housing 'cause taxes, bills orders of magnitude, more homes than we do in California. So we are. And people will say we're making Texas bluer.

That's a good thing. No. These are primarily people. Lower middle income people leaving from the redder parts of the state, from the Central Valley and other parts of the state. Leaving for Texas, making Texas redder, not bluer. On us for doing that. If you're an environmentalist, if you're a pragmatic environmentalist, California's got the, the cleanest energy standards, the cleanest gasoline standards.

We profess to want to be the leader in climate, all things climate change related. When that, when those 40,000 people leave our state for Texas, their per capita greenhouse gas production in California is nine tons. You create nine tons. I create nine tons. My daughter creates nine tons. We all, per capita, create about nine tons of greenhouse gases a year.

And Texas, it's 27 tons. So those 40,000 people times 18, which is the difference between nine and 27, that's on us. A society, we have refused to allow those people to live here in California. So we've sent them to Texas where, they still burn coal to create electricity. And then, you've gotta drive your pickup truck, 18 miles to get a gallon of milk.

So that's on us. We did that. Shame on us for doing it. If we're professed to be environmental stewards and pragmatic environmentalists and leaders in, in addressing global climate change. We should have high standards in California, but not so high that they don't allow people to live here. And we have gone past that limit a long time ago.

We have made it cost prohibitive for people to live here and they're going to coal burning states as a result. A number of years ago, I was in the state capitol with some logistics folks from Tesla, and Tesla wanted to build their new battery gigafactory.

In the Central Valley in Patterson, they had a site already scoped out and it was great for logistics to get to and from the factory in Fremont. And they needed an expedited CEQA process because their principal batter battery manufacturing investor, Panasonic said, this factory needs to be operational in two years, needs to be open and making batteries within two years, or, we're not gonna invest in it.

I'm sitting in the, in, in the state Senate with the president of the Senate at the time and the head of the Environmental CEQAlity Committee in the state legislature, and we're asking for an expedited C process, just six months in court. That's all we wanted. Six months in court. We will do the environmental analysis, we'll do the reviews, but limit the litigation process to six months while we're in that meeting.

The mayor of Sparks, Nevada is texting photographs. To the Tesla team of Earth moving equipment, clearing pads in Nevada for the battery factory. They were competing for the factory too. That factory is, of course, today in Sparks, Nevada. It employs 10,000 people, blue collar, good paying jobs. And and those batteries are trucked over the Sierra Nevada and diesel trucks to the factory.

In Fremont, our environment, our principal environmental law sent a clean energy factory to a coal burning state, and we truck those products back over the Sierras to the factory here, where they're prepared for final assembly. It's nuts. Absolutely insane. These are the ramifications of having standards under CEQA that are out of control.

If we profess to want to be the leaders in all things climate related in California, we need to make a state where people can afford to live. The definition of leadership is quite simple. All you need to be a leader are followers. And if California wants to be a leader on climate, it needs to create a climate regimen, a climate.

Set of policies that other states and other countries will follow. If we crash our economy off a cliff, if we make it cost prohibitive for middle income people to live here, nobody will follow. We will become a sad story, a warning to others of how not to do climate change policy. And so I think what we've seen in the recent efforts to reform CEQA is a realization that nobody's gonna follow us.

If we continue to get more and more expensive and our population continues to decline and people flee the state for other states and for jobs and for housing, we have to create a California that's affordable for everyone. And that where advanced manufacturing and green manufacturing can thrive. And that, the CEQAL litigation, the challenges on just about everything are kept to a minimum.

And we have to, and we've, we're beginning to see some chinks of light in that regard, but we've a lot of catch it up to do as a state.

Yeah, that's really an interesting perspective when you talk about it and talk about sprawl. Texas is just, they're just building, like you said, in the middle of nowhere compared to the advantages we have here and they don't have mass transportation.

Talk. Let's get back into the history of CEQA and the arc. What has really led to the reform, because we've been talking about this reform and the need for this for 10 or 15 years, what was the final straw that got enough votes in the legislature?

It's, it's been trenched warfare.

I, there, there have been no, silver bullets that are aha moments where people woke up one day and went, this is wrong. We need to change it. It's been a slog. And. You go back over, e even a decade ago it would've been impossible to make any consequential changes to CEQA within the state legislature.

You had voices, certainly in the business community and in the pragmatic environmental community saying something needs to change. But then you go to the state legislature and you get me working for a business association going to the state legislature, which is dominated by Democrats saying.

We need to change this. On the other side of the argument, you have organized labor and the large environmental groups, the Sierra Club, NRDC, the Native Plant Society, the biological diversity groups. They're all saying no, don't believe the evil business groups.

They just want to destroy California for profit. And guess what happened? Nothing changed for the longest time. So over that time I think the abuses of CEQA continued to stack up. I mentioned the Planned Parenthood example. In San Francisco when Gavin Newsom was mayor, he decided to have bicycle lanes.

Bicycle lanes are gonna be a priority for San Francisco. So he painted bicycle lanes. A single car advocate said you didn't do an appropriate environmental analysis for those bicycle lanes. I'm suing you under se A. The city had to fire up the butane tanks and burn all that paint off the street because they hadn't done an appropriate, according to the courts se a analysis.

Then they had to go through a multi-year sCEQA analysis and then repaint the streets. Again, and that there are multiple examples of of se abuses like that, that are. Obviously antithetical to any kind of environmental objectives. So we, and then the sort of the cherry on the cake was the People's Park Housing project in Berkeley, where the opponents of that said that the students are pollution, they're noise pollution.

They're noisier than the average people. Therefore, they must be deemed noise pollution. And the proponents of the project didn't sufficiently analyze the noise pollution created by students. Therefore, the project should be denied. When you get to the, the point where you're deeming.

Students as polluters, as pollution, just for not because of their activ, just for their very existence, they are pollution. The state of you got to the point where, like this, we gotta do something. This no longer passes the laugh test parallel to all of the sort of the. The abuse case studies that were continuing to stack up the politics in California were beginning to evolve.

We had the evolution of the NIMBY move, or sorry, the NIMBY movement. Yes. In my backyard as a counter to the NIMBY movement, not in my backyard. So a bunch of young people, angry young people who've been left on the sidelines, can't afford a place to live. They want to live in the Bay Area.

They eventually want to own a home and participate in the American Dream, but we've made that impossible for the next generation. So they've been involved in organizing and getting into politics and and making their case loudly and very well. I might add. So it's been great having that foil and ally in the CEQAL reform movement.

And then it's just been convincing good lawmakers and electing good lawmakers who understand that CEQA has had, has many negative consequences as positive, and that we need to make the types of reforms that, we'll see California grow in the manner that we profess to want it to grow.

So people like Scott Weiner and Buffy Wicks and Jesse Argen. I gotta say that the Bay Area and the East Bay in particular. Has been the standard bearer for the types of reforms that we need. Nancy Skinner and Berkeley. Berkeley was for a generation, the epicenter of, left nimbyism of old guard environmental policies.

And that changed, with Nancy Skinner. She said no, I get that we need to protect the environment but people need a place to live. And I would rather they live in Berkeley and work in Berkeley rather than live in Manteca and work in Berkeley. So we need to do our share.

We need to participate in in, in solving this problem. So she became a champion for Urban and Phil Housing and then, buffy Wicks and then Jesse ine, and my own senator Tim Grayson has been a quiet champion for all of this as well. He's taken more brave votes, I think, than any other legislator I in, in Sacramento in the last number of years to allow for housing in his district.

We need more of that. We've been able to foster a coalition primarily Northern California, driven, the Southern California LA Caucus is still a decade behind us in terms of pragmatic thinking on this issue. It's still ridiculously difficult to convince LA lawmakers that sprawl is bad.

That auto dependent living is probably a thing we should be discouraging. That walking to work's a good thing. Walking to the store is a good thing. I always like to say, you look at San Francisco from an environmental perspective, San Francisco's the most environmentally sustainable city in the world to live in.

It's 50 degrees in January. It's 50 degrees in July. You don't need heat, you don't need ac. You can walk everywhere. You don't need a car. It's got great transit, it's got jobs, it's got services. So from an environmental perspective, it's probably one of the lowest carbon footprint places you can possibly live.

It's also the hardest place on planet Earth to build housing. Primarily blocked by environmentalists. The cognitive dissonance is unbelievable. And that's true for our region as a whole, in California as a whole. Coastal California is off limits to building housing, and most of our coast is very temperate.

The perfect place for housing? Nope. We want you to live in the Central Valley where it's, 25 degrees in January and 125 degrees in July. And you gotta drive two hours to your job on the coast and two hours home at night. We profess to want certain things, but we refuse to make the changes to allow those things to happen.

We dig our heels in on these antiCEQAted environmental laws that reflect the environmental priorities of the 1950s, not environmental priorities of the 2020s. And we're finally slowly catching up.

One of my favorite headlines over the years, which was eye-opening, was I think it was called Berkeley, 70 Liberals versus Modern Progressives, and it was exactly what we were talking about.

It was those old schools who just didn't, we're all in favor of environment and mass transit and more housing, just as long as it's not in my backyard. But it wasn't like they were fighting conservatives. They were fighting against people who were saying, I wanna live where I could walk to work and things.

I think that was eyeopening. We have this sequel reform now. Permit Streamlining is a big issue. Cities are dragging their feet. I believe the governor was just in San Francisco, the former mayor of San Francisco was just in saying, you've got to improve and use technology to improve your permit

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Talk a little bit about what's going on there, how can cities be working to improve their permit process, but still get what they need out of it?

There's the pre entitlement CEQA process, which is just, we've talked about that at length. And then there's the post entitlement permitting process.

So once you get your, your legal entitlement to build, you've gone through the CEQA process, or you've been deemed exempt then you've got to you. You build your project and then you've gotta get permits from the city, all through the construction process.

You've gotta continually go to the city for permits and at the beginning of the process, during the process. And then after the process, after your project is finished, there are a whole bunch of permits that have to be signed off on by the city and that process is arduous and complicated and expensive.

And can, adds just heaps and heaps of unnecessary costs. Our own office in San Francisco that we moved into three years ago. I think we just in the last month got our final sign off on our fire permits from the fire department. And I don't think we have our certificate of occupancy yet.

Three years after opening the doors. And still, fighting the city to get permits and having inspectors come in and look at, the size of the font on the Fire escape, exit sign, all of that stuff. , Constant bureaucracy. San Francisco's guilty of it way more than most, and.

I would like to give the city the benefit of the doubt that they're just being, a perfectionist and they're being a as careful and as as detail oriented as possible in the process. But having heard so many horror stories, one would have to believe that there's a certain amount of, throwing sand in the gears to slow stuff down.

Positive outcomes and making sure that projects are safe and well, built and well inspected. And the elevators are, safe and they're not gonna, fall apart and the windows have been installed correctly. All of these inspections can be done in an expedited.

Timely, cost effective manner. It shouldn't take, 6, 8, 9 months three years in our case to get a certificate of occupancy for your project. So cities can and should be more attentive to getting these permits out the door in a timely fashion. Those are the permits on the back end, but, getting your construction permits, at the beginning of the project.

Your permits to excavate your permits to to, dig a foundation, your per, arduous expensive. And then you run into a whole bunch. We could go down a bunch, a number of blind alleys here, Jared, you then you run into, the Bay Area Air CEQAlity Management District who you have to go to get a permit.

As soon as you put a shovel in the dirt, they will go no fugitive dust can leave this construction site. One particle of dust is one too many. So as soon as you put a shovel in the dirt. You know if they're, then you put your air monitors up and they come and inspect, if they see a particle of dust landing on a car across the street, they'll shut you down.

So again, trying to do urban infill, the types of projects that we really want and desire to reduce vehicle miles. Travel to reduce greenhouse gases. You have to mitigate everything to zero, which is functionally impossible. So these permits require you to do everything to perfection. And perfection is, it's in the realm of the gods, not in the realms of man.

And so we can't be perfect. Nothing ever is, but we demand it of these projects. And, if you're not perfect, you don't get your pro your permit and again, slows everything down. Add costs and makes housing and everything else difficult, ion impossible to build.

The Bay Air CEQAlity District and their regulations has been a large topic around the refineries and around manufacturing particularly those clean energy projects.

Before we leave, Matt. What advice do you want to give to city leaders around and elected officials from the legislature on down around building and CEQA and everything else?

Have, look what, ask yourself, what are your desired outcomes? What do you profess to want as an elected official for the future of California? What, does the future of California look like to you? In a successful, what does a successful outcome look like for California? For me?

It's a state that's affordable for working families to live in. It's a state that leads on environmental stewardship and on greenhouse gas reduction. It's a state that, that, that has, that was the state that offered opportunity. It was a state where people wanna come to back in the sixties and seventies, songwriters used to write songs about coming to California.

Nobody writes those songs anymore. We want songwriters to write songs about coming to California again about the shining city on the hill that it once was. We need to become that plaCEQAgain. And and how do you do that in a sustainable, equitable manner? And it requires growth. It requires progress.

We need to find a way to, to have it all. We need to have growth and progress, affordability, equity, and environmental stewardship. We have placed certain things on a much higher pedestal than others. We have. We've had a generation of progressive leadership in California with the most regressive outcomes for society.

The wealth gap in California continues to grow. It becomes less and less affordable for low income people every single day. So I would challenge elected officials in California to look at the outcomes that have been achieved by the policies that have been put in place by these unelected, bureaucrats at the California Air Resources Board at the Bay Area, air CEQAlity Management, di district appointed bodies that have supreme control and authority over how we.

Run our state and our region and its economy and they don't give a fig. About jobs. The air district will tell you with unabashed pride that taking one particulate matter outta the air is more important to them than saving 10,000 jobs. They don't care. We can have the jobs and clean air.

We, we can have both. But these siloed agencies that have single mission scopes of work they, economic growth and development, they don't care. They really don't care. They, if you lose your job, not our problem. Shouldn't have worked at that refinery. Shouldn't have worked at that car manufacturing facility.

Shouldn't have worked at that battery facility. We don't care. So we need people to start caring again about jobs in the economy and equity so that those 40,000 people who leave for Texas every year can stay here and can afford to live here. So I would challenge, to answer your question for the elected officials.

Ask yourself what California looks like in the future as successful California from the three E's perspective, the economy, the environment, and equity. And can we balanCEQAll three and can we have all three? I argue that we can, we're smart enough, we're good enough, we have the people here to do it. But for the last generation we have placed environmental stewardship, and I would argue the wrong kind of environmental stewardship, that 1970s version of environmental stewardship.

We've placed that on a higher plane than the economy and equity, and they have both suffered as a result. And we've seen a keyboard economy develop in California where if you've got an advanced degree and you can plug in and you can work and keyboard economy is clean, people working on their laptops don't create a lot of greenhouse gases.

We've sacrificed our manufacturing economy and our energy and everything else. On the altar of this 1970s version of of environmentalism. We ship those jobs. Again, I mentioned the batteries. We ship those jobs to other state, but we still import the the products. At the end of the day. We still use those batteries.

We still use all of the manufactured materials and products that we've shipped. The jobs to other states. We still use them, but it's not create those greenhouse gases aren't created in California, so we get to say, yay us. Look at our greenhouse gas reduction numbers. We've re, we have all the numbers are unimpeachable.

All of our recent greenhouse gas reduction numbers are primarily driven by loss of population and loss of jobs. It's not because we've become. It's not because we're all driving battery driven cars and we're, we're putting solar on our roofs. Those are marginal benefits.

The principle driver of our greenhouse gas reduction success has been driving people in Jobs outta California. So I would argue if we wanna lead on this, and again, going back to the question, to our elected officials and leaders, we can lead on environmentalism. And we can have social equity and we can have a diverse job base, and we can have people who make 65, 70 $5,000 a year in blue collar jobs and can afford to live in California, can afford a home in California.

We can have that other states have it. And I would argue that we have, we're much smarter than a lot of these other states. We have the brain power here to do it and I would challenge them to, rise to that occasion and and see if we can't. Find a future for California where we can all afford to live here.

That's a great way to end. Thank you Matt Regan from the Bay Area Council for joining me today.

Thank you, Jared. Thank you. Much appreciated.

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