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A California legislator wants to solve the state’s housing crisis, juice its economy, fight climate change and save the Democratic Party with one “excruciatingly non-sexy” idea.

By Ben Christopher,

CalMatters

Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks sees the slow, occasionally redundant, often litigious process of getting construction projects okayed by federal, state and local governments as a chief roadblock to fixing California’s most pressing problems, from housing to water to public transportation to climate change.

Last year, Wicks helmed a select committee on “permitting reform” — a catch-all term for speeding up government review at all stages of a project’s development, not just its literal permits. The committee went on a state-hopping fact-finding mission, taking testimony from experts, builders and advocates on why it takes so long to build apartment buildings, wind farms, water storage and public transit, to name a few notoriously slow and desperately needed project types.

Today, that committee released its final report. The summary, per Wicks, is that “it is too damn hard to build anything in California.”

The report stresses the need for the state to build millions of new housing units and electric vehicle chargers; thousands of miles of transit; drought, flooding and sea level rise projects; and renewable energy projects “built and interconnected at three times the historical rate.”

Though the jargon-laden technical analysis isn’t likely to go viral, the report tees up what could be one of the biggest legislative battles of the coming year. Wicks said lawmakers in both chambers are hammering out 20 bills on permitting snags for housing construction alone. Other bills to speed approvals for transit, clean energy and water projects are reportedly in the works too.

Lawmakers regularly pass one-off bills aimed at making it easier for favored projects to get built. Nearly every legislative session for the last decade has seen at least a handful of “streamlining” bills for dense housing.

This political moment may be primed for something bigger, said Wicks. In the capitol, an aggressive red-tape snipping mood seems to have set in. More California officials, especially in Los Angeles and especially in the wake of January’s wildfires, want to re-examine how buildings get permitted.

President Trump’s unambiguous, if modest, electoral victory in November, riding a wave of public anger over Biden-era inflation, has pushed many Democrats to reorient their policy platforms toward cost of living issues.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a Salinas Democrat, kicked off this year’s legislative session by urging lawmakers to “consider every bill through the lens” of affordability. Gov. Gavin Newsom more recently acknowledged “the inability of the state of California to get out of its own way” on big, important projects. He suspended certain environmental regulations for fire prevention projects last Saturday.

In California and across the country, concurrent housing and climate crises have convinced many lawmakers and Democratic-leaning policy commentators to prioritize building lots and lots of things: apartment buildings, EV charging stations, electric transmission lines, solar and wind farms, rail lines and bus networks. The quicker the better.

The catastrophic Los Angeles firestorms from January highlighted just how difficult it can be to rebuild. Newsom has named cutting environmental regulations and speeding up entitlement and permitting processes in the burned areas as his top priority.

In Sacramento, a new batch of state lawmakers, elected partly by mad-as-hell voters and unscarred by past legislative battles over permitting changes, may be newly receptive to making big changes too.

“All of that combined makes, I think, a unique opportunity for us to actually have some pretty significant change,” said Wicks.

The report itself does not offer precise recommendations, but its analysis is often tellingly specific, offering clues about the changes that lawmakers can expect to debate this spring.

Described as “opportunities for reform,” these are, in Wicks’ words, often “excruciatingly non-sexy.” For example, the report notes that lawmakers could be more specific about when a certain type of housing application is deemed “complete” in order to shield developers from future legal changes. Another “opportunity”: Allow for third-party experts to sign off on a project’s plans.

Current policies that could be a template for regulatory revamping, according to the report: the state’s bolstering of accessory dwelling units, electric vehicle charging stations and certain environmental restoration projects.

But those “success stories” share a trait that points to what could be the most contentious aspect of the coming legislative package. All three are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, a 1970 law that requires governments to study and publish findings on the environmental impact of any decision they make, including the approval of new housing, transit or energy projects.

The act, pronounced see-kwah, is among the most fiercely debated in California politics. Opponents contend that the law is regularly hijacked by special interest groups, such as NIMBY property owners or organized labor unions, to stall projects for decidedly non-environmental reasons. They point to high profile court battles as examples of the act’s abuse, such as the case resolved by the state Supreme Court last year in which Berkeley neighborhood groups argued that the noise predicted to come from college student housing amounted to a pollutant under the law.

“If we want to reach our climate change goals, CEQA needs to be reformed,” Wicks said. “If we want to reach our housing goals, CEQA needs to be reformed.”

Defenders of the law say it is vital to deliberation, public input and transparency, keeping local and state governments and developers from running roughshod over vulnerable communities.

“Sometimes, for vulnerable communities, the act is the only tool available to have a seat at the decision making table,” said J.P. Rose, a policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “To brush all of that aside to say ‘that’s just permitting,’ I think that’s a misguided lens to address this issue.”

Lawmakers often carve specific exemptions into the law, but historically, making across-the-board changes to CEQA has been a heavy lift in Sacramento. Two years ago, Newsom rolled out plans to overhaul the law in order to speed up the approval of big, infrastructure projects. Many of its most ambitious proposals were sidelined. Last year, the Legislature tried to rush through a bill aimed at getting clean energy projects up and running more quickly (it failed).

“Right now, there are too many opportunities in the process to put a wrench in the gears.”

Buffy Wicks, Assemblymember, Oakland  

Lawmakers are likely to spend plenty of time arguing about the act, no matter what happens to the permitting package. One bill, already in print, by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, would make it easier for urban housing projects to exempt themselves from the law and for local and state governments to avoid having to conduct full environmental reviews for every aspect of each project. The senator dubbed it “the fast and focused CEQA Act.”

Rose, at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the bill “fires a shotgun at the heart of CEQA.”

Carter Rubin, a public transportation advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council who testified to the select committee last year, said there ought to be a difference between the way regulators review projects that help achieve the state’s housing and climate goals and those that emphatically do not.

“We certainly would not support streamlining highway expansion or sprawl development that impacts ecosystems,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s really important that the Legislature focuses on shovel-worthy projects, not just shovel-ready projects.”

Wicks said she will put forward a housing bill on CEQA as part of the overall package.

“Right now, there are too many opportunities in the process to put a wrench in the gears,” she said. “There will be a cost for us Democrats on the ballot in the future if we don’t fix that problem.”