In June, the California legislature passed a deeply flawed bill that stripped away critical protections for our state’s environment and communities. Leaders in the legislature acknowledged the bill’s flaws and promised to fix them before the legislature adjourned for the year, but they failed to uphold that promise. This leaves California’s lands, wildlife, and people without key environmental protections. Green Foothills is part of a coalition supporting new legislation that will fix this bill to safeguard local nature and people.
Dangerous Exemptions to Environmental Protection Law
The bill, Senate Bill 131 (SB 131), exempts certain kinds of projects from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), our landmark law requiring environmental review and public input. One of these exemptions, for “Advanced Manufacturing” projects, is especially dangerous. This broad umbrella term covers industries like aerospace, weapons, strip mining, semiconductors, lithium battery plants, chemical recycling, and many more – all of which are known sources of toxic pollution, explosions, groundwater contamination, and radiation. Santa Clara County still suffers from toxic plumes emanating from 23 Superfund sites left by semiconductor plants. Last January, San Benito County was blanketed by toxic smoke from a lithium battery fire in Moss Landing.
Exempting these kinds of projects from CEQA means these polluting industries can be built near homes, schools, and important habitat without any environmental analysis, public transparency, or responsibility for mitigation or clean up. Tribes also lose their right to weigh in on the cultural impacts of these proposals.
SB 131 also fails to protect threatened and endangered species habitat, leaving these critical landscapes open to Advanced Manufacturing facilities. We are already seeing developers exploit this loophole. For example, developers had proposed a warehouse on San Bruno Mountain, home to a number of endangered and threatened butterfly species. The day that SB 131 was signed into law, they announced they’d be changing their proposal to an Advanced Manufacturing facility, potentially to avoid the environmental studies and mitigation required under CEQA.
Rushed Process Evades Public Input and Legislative Scrutiny
Instead of moving through the normal process, SB 131 was lumped into the budget as a trailer bill — bypassing committees, skipping full hearings, and giving legislators and the public just three days to review it. However, legislators knew the bill was dangerous and committed to passing clean-up legislation before the end of the session to fix the most egregious aspects.
Green Foothills worked with a coalition of over 235 organizations to hold legislators to their promise. We met with lawmakers and their staff, signed onto letters, made phone calls, sent emails, and called on all of you to take action (thanks to all who did!).
Thirty-five state legislators signed onto a letter publicly calling for the Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas, Senate Pro Tempore Mike McGuire, and Governor Gavin Newsom to take action, including representatives from the regions Green Foothills works in, like Senators Dave Cortese and John Laird, and Assembly Members Gail Pellerin, Ash Kalra, and Alex Lee. However, the leaders in the Legislature ignored them, breaking their promise to repair this reckless bill.
The Path Forward
The fight isn’t over. Twenty-two legislators have co-authored AB 1083, a bill to fix the worst problems created by SB 131. AB 1083 expands habitat protections, and narrows the “advanced manufacturing” exemption to semiconductors only — with strict safeguards for workers, communities, and the environment.
The Legislature will vote on AB 1083 in 2026. In the coming months, Green Foothills will press legislators to act, making sure they understand that reinstating these protections is essential for our environment and our communities. With environmental protections being gutted at the national level, California should be leading the way in strengthening ours, not eliminating them.
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