Recent legislative efforts to streamline the far-reaching California Environmental Quality Act should lessen the environmental-review burden on infill and transit-oriented projects, proponents say. Detractors contend the reforms won't reduce the lawsuits that, they claim, abuse CEQA's original intent. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed S.B. 743 into law in September 2013. The bill amalgamated CEQA reform with specific provisions to foster speedy development of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings in order to meet a deadline imposed by the National Basketball Association. The Governor's Office of Planning and Research is expected to release a revised CEQA guidelines draft in July, with implementation by 2015.
The new guidelines will revamp the unpopular level of service (LOS) calculations against which traffic impacts of projects are assessed and resolved. Proponents hope the changes eliminate "the bias in CEQA that actually encourages widening roads and too often leads to reducing the size of development projects in sustainable locations to minimize impact on LOS, which is considered from the standpoint of a car, rather than of people and habitat," says Tim Frank, director of the Center for Sustainable Neighborhoods, San Francisco.