On June 30, through a rushed last-minute process, the California Legislature approved one of the most devastating rollbacks ever of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) – the state’s signature environmental law. Green Foothills is working with a coalition of over 130 nonprofit organizations to urge the Legislature to fix the worst issues with this legislation.  If unaddressed, it will harm sensitive species and allow polluting industries to avoid environmental review. Please email your legislators using the form below, and ask them to fix this harmful legislation!

What’s Happening: New Law Endangers Wildlife and Greenlights Polluters

Last month, the State Legislature passed sweeping rollbacks to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the law that protects our environment by requiring review of projects that could cause environmental harm. These rollbacks were contained in two budget trailer bills—AB 130 and SB 131—that were tacked onto the state budget bill that passed into law on June 30.

Our biggest concerns are with SB 131, which includes two especially damaging provisions:

• It fails to protect threatened and endangered species, and
• It gives a full CEQA exemption to “advanced manufacturing facilities”—a broad category that includes highly polluting industries.

If these two issues are fixed, the worst impacts of this legislation can still be avoided.

These bills were rushed through with little time for public or legislative review. SB 131 was made public only days before the vote, and several lawmakers raised serious concerns about its contents and the lack of transparency. Despite this, the bill passed after Governor Newsom said he wouldn’t sign the state budget without it. However, lawmakers made a commitment to consider amending the bill to fix these problems.

CEQA plays a vital role in protecting people and the environment. It ensures harmful impacts from development are studied and addressed—and it gives communities a chance to speak up. Without CEQA, environmentally destructive projects can move forward without any public oversight.

Every other recent bill creating exemptions from CEQA included a safeguard stating that the exemption doesn’t apply to projects located on habitat for species that are threatened or endangered, or that are candidates for threatened or endangered status. AB 130, which creates an exemption for multifamily housing in urban areas, includes this safeguard. But SB 131 does not, even though it creates new CEQA exemptions for a wide range of industrial and commercial projects that can be located in rural areas outside of cities, including potentially on habitat for threatened and endangered species. Without CEQA review, we will simply never know if these projects harm or destroy these vulnerable species or their habitat.

SB 131 also fully exempts “advanced manufacturing facilities” from environmental review. This category is so broad that it could include semiconductor plants (the source of many of Silicon Valley’s toxic Superfund sites), lithium battery factories, rocket fuel production, and plastic manufacturing. Many of these industries are extremely polluting—and there’s no reason they should be allowed to bypass environmental review entirely.

Why It Matters: Developers Are Already Exploiting the Changes

The harmful effects of SB 131 can already be seen in the Guadalupe Quarry project on San Bruno Mountain. Originally planned as a large warehouse and distribution center, the project was suddenly changed to an “advanced manufacturing facility” on the same night SB 131 passed. The site is home to endangered butterflies, but because SB 131 excludes protections for endangered species and exempts advanced manufacturing from environmental review, an extremely toxic and polluting project could be located right on top of endangered butterfly habitat with no environmental accountability. Unless these harmful provisions in SB 131 are fixed, the same thing could happen in other areas throughout California.

What You Can Do

We are working with a coalition of over 130 other environmental groups across the state to urge the Legislature to fix the issues with habitat for threatened and endangered species and the CEQA exemption for advanced manufacturing facilities.

Please email your legislators and ask them to pass follow-up legislation that will mitigate the worst effects of SB 131 by protecting habitat for species that are threatened or endangered, or that are candidates for threatened or endangered status, and by removing the exemption for advanced manufacturing facilities.