With climate change causing wilder swings in the weather, sea level rise, more intense wildfires and other challenges, Aruna Prabhala, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said during the hearing that one thing CEQA can do is to help keep development out of the highest-risk areas - or at least require developers to take steps to make residents and businesses in those places safer. And in Newport Beach, a home was demolished Thursday in the Back Bay, following a landslide earlier this month that prompted officials to red tag the structure. Another landslide about a mile north shut down Coast Highway, while flooding in Huntington Beach also halted traffic. My colleague Laylan Connelly reported on four apartment buildings that were red-tagged in San Clemente following a landslide. My colleague Jeff Horseman wrote the court agreed with environmental groups that plans for the proposed Villages of Lakeview, an 8,725-home community that would border the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, didn’t include enough details about how the massive development would impact local water supplies or how a touted wildlife stewardship fund would actually be used.Īt the same time, our Southern California papers have been filled with examples of what can happen when development and the environment clash. The potential power of CEQA just hit home in the Inland Empire, after a court partially struck down an environmental impact report required under the state law for a controversial project that’s been in the works between Perris and San Jacinto for nearly two decades. But as the housing crisis escalates, and in the wake of CEQA being used to block a high-profile student housing project near UC Berkeley, talk of changing the law has reached a fever pitch. Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1970. Developers have called for CEQA reform ever since then-Gov. The March 16 hearing kicked off the first-ever CEQA study by the influential Little Hoover Commission, which makes recommendations to the state legislature and the governor’s office about potential changes to policies and practices. And in this week’s issue of The Compost, I wanted to share more context and voices from folks who weighed in on both sides of the debate over whether it’s time to reform the law that’s served as a bedrock of California environmental law for more than half a century. I listened so you didn’t have to, with a detailed story out that evening. Crushed at news of the shooting there, and thinking of all the kind people we met during our trip…įor five and a half hours the Thursday before we left, witnesses shared testimony about the power and the pitfalls of the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA. Time for a special double edition of The Compost! I was on vacation last week, soaking in the live music, awesome food and complex history of Nashville for the first time.

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