This audio is automatically generated. Do us know if you have comments.
Prosecutor William Sloan is a member at the San Francisco Office in Washington, Venable, based at DC. Opinions are typical of the author.
In a state with a well -known reputation of antidevelopization, real estate and building professionals have a rare victory to celebrate it.
William Sloan
Venable courtesy
The California Environmental Quality Act has long shaped the state development landscape, often entangling projects in long permit processes. This landscape has changed dramatically.
In a daring effort to deal with the California housing crisis and promote economic growth, Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills, with 130 and SB 131, in the law of June 30, marking CEQA’s most significant review in decades. Both give the developers a very necessary victory on the landscape of the California building.
Enlarge developments
The first, AB 130, establishes a wide exemption from CEQA for multifamily and mixed use residential developments. In order to obtain the qualification, the projects must be complicated with code, in an urban area and located in a place that is not more than 20 hectares.
In a dramatic outing of the past rules, with 130 it does not impose the affordable requirements of housing, work or salary as conditions for the exemption of CEQA for most projects less than 85 feet high. Although projects involving the demolition of historical structures or located in sensitive areas, such as fire danger areas, wetlands or dangerous waste places, CEQA will still have to fulfill, this change should only significantly facilitate the approval of developers for these constructions.
The reason why the new law is much more resistant to litigation than the categorical exemption of class 32 existing for entertainment housing.
Although Class 32 aimed to relieve approval of breach, as with other exemptions created according to California Law, a class 32 exemption can still be annulled if there are “unusual circumstances” associated with the project that can have environmental impacts.
To this point, project opponents have often used the argument of “unusual circumstances” to derail infil projects or at least link them in years of litigation. The great victory at AB 130 is that it eliminates this strategy by creating a legal exemption, which cannot be annulled based on unusual circumstances. In this way, the new law creates greater certainty and reduces the risk of litigation associated with housing projects.
Pro development intention
In this step further, SB 131 reinforces the development of development of these reforms, making it clear that “CEQA should not be used mainly for economic interests, to assume competition, to obtain competitive advantage or to delay a project for reasons that are not related to environmental protection”. This has been the Playbook Activists used by antididevision activists over the years.
Instead, the new bill extends CEQA exemptions to include a number of other types of socially beneficial projects, including children’s care centers, health clinics, food banks, agricultural workers’ housing, broadband infrastructure, water systems, parks and advanced manufacturing facilities.
It is important to note that SB 131 also introduces a rationalized CEQA review for Infill housing projects that are lost closely to obtain a complete exemption. Instead of triggering a thorough environmental review, agencies must now focus only on specific environmental impacts related to the disqualification criterion. In this way, a key procedural suffocating point is eliminated that has suffered projects in the past.
And perhaps the most encouraging for developers, SB 131 now imposes a period of 30 days firm for public agencies to approve or disapprove of a qualification project.
A change for better
This marks an amazing departure from often open review deadlines that have historically left development. Entering the actual deadlines, the legislature has added teeth to the CEQA reforms, reducing the uncertainty and signaling of a strong push towards the delivery of projects and the accountability.
These broad reforms aim to eliminate long bottlenecks in urban development and infrastructure development: factors were often blamed as causes of housing costs increasing California and slow economic expansion.
Combined with recent changes to federal environmental regulations, with 130 and SB 131 promise a smoother and more predictable path for the approval of the project and are immediately effective. This means that qualification projects still in the pipeline allowed now could be exempt from CEQA, provided that authorization has not been completed.
This is another reason for developers to encourage.
Sarah Hoffman, an associate venable, contributed to this article.
