PD Editorial: Take time to reform CEQA the right way

Jerry Brown, our always loquacious governor, proclaimed recently that reforming CEQA "is the lord's work."

CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act, the state's primary environmental protection law. It's complicated, it's contentious, it's frequently abused, and, as Brown's quip implies, it's ripe for revision.

But "the lord's work" — well, the Legislature's anyway — ought to be conducted in public.

Perhaps that will happen, at least in the case of CEQA, following state Senate President Darrell Steinberg's decision to table an attempt to rewrite the law in the closing hours of a two-year legislative session that ends today.

"This law, for all of its strengths and its faults, is far too important to rewrite in the last days of the session," Steinberg told reporters.

For the uninitiated, CEQA is the law that requires public agencies and private developers to analyze the environmental consequences of subdivisions, buildings, highways and other projects. They must consider alternatives and, if possible, mitigate any impacts.

Since it was passed in 1970, CEQA has halted plenty of bad projects. It's also been used to block, or simply delay, projects that threatened no serious damage. Four decades of court rulings have added to the complexity of CEQA compliance.

Any law of this scope should be reviewed and, if necessary, updated on a regular basis. In the case of CEQA, that's overdue.

Unfortunately, state legislators reflexively tried to treat this as another routine exercise in political log-rolling.

It only surfaced when a GOP legislator unexpectedly voted for an unrelated measure — a tax increase to fund college scholarships. Assemblyman Brian Nestande, whose vote cost him a leadership position, said he supported the tax bill because Speaker John P?ez promised that a CEQA reform measure would follow.

P?ez denied any deal but said he favored regulatory reform. Then, with eight days left in the legislative session, and months after the deadline to introduce new legislation, a CEQA bill was created using the gut-and-amend process that sidetracks the regular committee system. The deadline for committee action also had passed, leaving little opportunity for public input or analysis of the proposed changes.

That's when Steinberg stepped in, promising to put CEQA on the Legislature's agenda for 2013. A good first step would be scheduling public hearings around the state, as lawmakers did this year on pension reform, to discuss CEQA and the proposed changes that surfaced last week. After that review, there should be adequate time for stakeholders and other interested parties to review any bill before a vote.

The backers — a coalition of labor, business and local government representatives who hashed things out in private — say they aren't trying to gut the law, only to streamline the process. At first glance, which is all anyone outside the closed talks has gotten, some of the ideas have merit, such as eliminating duplicative environmental impact reports on proposals consistent with existing zoning codes and land use plans.

But changes of this magnitude cannot, and should not, be presented for the first time in the final days of the legislative session when hundreds of bills are being rushed through. On CEQA, try again next year.