Last month CNBC published a story about California’s high-speed rail project. After 15 years and $10 billion dollars spent, many people wonder why it has taken so long to see progress. There are many possible answers to that question on a project this far behind schedule and this far over budget, but one answer is that California’s environmental review laws make it a long, slow process to build anything.
The infrastructure design work is complete, and 422 out of 500 miles have been environmentally cleared, which is a monumental task in California.
“When we finish just the environmental clearing process, that cost is about $1.3 billion,” Kelly said. “And that’s for no steel in the ground or no cement.“
Some are calling to reform the National Environmental Policy Act to expedite infrastructure projects that would have a positive impact on the environment.
“When the National Environmental Policy Act makes us think really hard about building a 14-lane highway, that’s a good thing because 14-lane highways are terrible for the environment,” said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. “But when it makes high-speed rail so difficult to build in America, something that’s so fundamentally good for the environment, then we’ve got a problem. And that’s where we need reform.”
But it’s not just transportation projects that get delayed by environmental review laws. In February, the San Francisco Chronicle published an opinion piece titled “How fake environmental reviews kill housing in California.” The gist of the story is that California’s homelessness problem is largely the result of lack of new home construction which gradually drives up rents and makes the state unaffordable for many. The solution to that problem is to build more housing and California currently mandates that every city has a regularly updated plan for building more homes. But it turns out there’s a giant loophole.
A city council can skate around the Housing Accountability Act and other housing laws by repeatedly telling a developer that the city isn’t ready to make up its mind about a project, ostensibly because it thinks there’s a potential “environmental impact” that should be studied more for compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.
It doesn’t matter whether CEQA actually requires the study. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors rejected the environmental impact report for a downtown housing project because it didn’t address potential “gentrification impacts” (even though CEQA is about physical impacts, not speculative socioeconomic impacts) and because it didn’t address whether geotechnical features of the site might cause the building’s foundation to settle unusually (even though CEQA is concerned with effects of the project on the environment, not the other way around).
Such is the magic of environmentalism in California that this gambit can’t even be stopped by the courts.
In a ruling last October, a state court validated the supes’ ruse. The court said that because of CEQA, it can’t do anything to enforce state housing law until after the city wraps up its environmental review. And it also said that under CEQA, the court can’t review anything at all until the city certifies that the CEQA studies are all wrapped up!
In other words, so long as the city is demanding further study, a court is powerless to even review whether the city’s demand is legitimate.
And that brings us to this column by Ezra Klein titled “‘What the Hell Happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’” The point of the title, as you’ve probably guessed, is that there was a time long ago when California used to be able to build things. Now, thanks to environmental review, not so much. This has recently become painfully apparent to Gov. Gavin Newsom who is trying to build the new grid infrastructure that environmentalists have demanded only to have them block his efforts to make those projects easier to build.
It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining together to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California…
California has become notorious not for what it builds, but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he told me. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”…
The breadth of the opposition, and the emotion in Newsom’s defense, left me a bit unprepared for his actual permitting package, which is a collection of mostly modest, numbingly specific policies. When a lawsuit is brought under the California Environmental Quality Act, should all emails sent between agency staffers be part of the record, or only those communications seen by the decision makers? Should environmental litigation be confined to 270 days for certain classes of infrastructure? Should the California Department of Transportation contract jobs out by type, or does it need to run a new contracting process for each task? Should 15 endangered species currently classified as “fully protected” be reclassified as “threatened” to make building near them less onerous? And on it goes.
The battle over whether to build or to prevent building is reaching a fever pitch as California tries to get its hands on billions of federal dollars being doled out by the Biden Administration. Without that money, projects like high-speed rail and new electrical transmission lines probably won’t happen. Klein suggests the argument is serious enough that it is in danger of creating a schism among progressives between those who want to build and those who just want to slow walk all forms of construction.
Until now, progressives have been mostly united in the fight against climate change. They wanted more money for clean energy and more ambitious targets for phasing out fossil fuels and they got it. Now that new energy system needs to be built, and fast. And progressives are nowhere near agreement on how to do that.
Some of the commenters made some good points. This is the top comment.
It took 20 years to rebuild the Bay Bridge that was damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The California High Speed Rail Authority hasn’t built an inch of track despite getting money from ARRA in 2009. The Los Angeles Metro line to Santa Monica takes such a circuitous route that it’s impractical to take to or from work. The Wilshire Line has been held up for years by bickering whether it should go under Beverly Hills High School and is now slated to terminate before it gets to where it needs to go.
California can’t. It can litigate. It can argue. Just like America in general, nothing of value or that really improves the lives of people ever gets done.
Here’s the #2 comment (ranked by upvotes from other readers).
I’m a democrat but it’s the progressives that are ruining California. The left wing environmentalists will end our fossil fuel cars and power plants with nothing to replace them. When the laws go into affect they will either be repealed or California will suffer. And it’s not just the environmentalists, San Francisco is being destroyed by the progressives that don’t believe that criminals should be punished. It’s just virtue signaling politics with complete disregard to reality. Sad to see it happening but are are leaving next year after our kids graduation.
When California fails to get any of this done I’m sure someone somewhere will want to blame the failure on conservatives but as these articles demonstrate, that’s not where the problem lies. California can’t build anything anymore because the far left has become the party of building nothing, not even the things they say they want to see built.
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