Our environmental laws are based, like that of COVID masks, vaccines on junk science and political power. They are meant to extort developers, homeowners and create expensive homes and commercial property—they are Not about saving the Earth—why do we listen to the scam artist Al Gore and his friend the high school drop out Greta?
Now, one of the laws has come home to bite us. Thanks the CEQA, about 3,000 students will NOT be allowed to attend Cal Berkeley in the Fall due to lack of housing—caused by CEQA. So Socialist Democrat State Senator Scott Weiner has a bill to exempt Cal rom the law. He believes it is OK for government to harm the environment. More proof CEQA and the environmental laws are about money and power, not making us safer.
Another misuse of environmental quality law affects UC students
BY DAN WALTERS, CalMatters, 2/21/22
IN SUMMARY
The California Environmental Quality Act is one of those laws that generate unintended consequences, and need a fresh look.
Were I to write another book about California politics — which is very unlikely — it would be entitled “Unintended Consequences,” detailing how political policy decrees mutate to have unforeseen effects.
Examples of the syndrome are legion, but here are just two:
—In the 1960s, newly elected Gov. Ronald Reagan signed two pieces of legislation that purported to reform the care and treatment of the mentally ill. They set in motion a phaseout of the state’s extensive system of mental hospitals in favor of community mental health clinics. Reagan wanted to save money and advocates for the mentally ill had decried the prison-like, abusive atmosphere of the hospitals.
Reagan, successor governors and the Legislature never fully delivered on the promise of community mental health care, leaving many of the mentally ill then and since to fend for themselves and contributing to the homeless crisis that now afflicts the state.
Bottom of Form
—Two seemingly distinct acts in the late 1970s, the extension of collective bargaining rights to California’s public employees in 1975 and the passage of Proposition 13, the landmark property tax limit, in 1978, together led to public employee unions’ dominance of the Legislature.
Proposition 13 indirectly shifted financial responsibility for schools, and much of local government, to the state. As state and local workforces became almost totally unionized, the concentration of financial power in Sacramento gave unions the motivation to reshape the Legislature into an overwhelmingly pro-union body.
The California Environmental Quality Act, also signed by Reagan, is a third major example. Its stated aim was to compel sponsors of projects to evaluate their impacts on the environment and mitigate, as much as possible, adverse effects.
Over the more than half-century since its passage, however, CEQA has morphed into a legal morass that can stall even the most benign projects indefinitely as opponents raise objections that often have nothing to do with environmental protection.
It’s not uncommon, for example, for construction unions to threaten or file CEQA lawsuits in ill-disguised efforts to force project managers into giving their members exclusive access to jobs. CEQA has become so onerous that the Legislature often gives high-profile projects — such as sports arenas — specific exemptions from some of its provisions, including this year’s Super Bowl stadium in Inglewood.
CEQA is a major factor, although not the only one, in California’s inability to build enough housing, especially homes for low- and moderate-income families, to meet demand. Those who don’t want such housing in their neighborhoods use CEQA as a tool to stop construction, or delay it so long that it becomes financially unworkable.
