California Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, on Monday announced he’s introducing legislation to ensure that sustainable safety and transit projects get done efficiently and remain exempt from timely environmental reviews.
Last year, Wiener’s Senate Bill 288 went into effect, exempting certain transit projects that improve safety or advance bus and light-rail service from going through the California Environmental Quality Act review process — a process that can often take months or years to complete.
The bill aims to help transit agencies implement specific projects like bus-only lanes and safety improvements impacting pedestrians and bicyclist more quickly.
The bill is set to expire at the end of this year, but Wiener’s newly proposed Senate Bill 922 would make his previous legislation permanent.
Wiener introduced the new bill last week.
During a briefing on Monday, Wiener said, “If you are implementing one of these climate friendly projects, you should not have to go through unending environmental review. That is counterproductive. Instead, the bill creates an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, for these climate friendly and sustainable transportation projects.”
According to Weiner, since SB 288 went into effect, 10 significant transit projects have been approved statewide, and another 20 are already in the pipeline.
“These projects really do make a huge impact,” he said. “These projects get caught up in CEQA. They take a long time to approve and then they get caught up in appeals and lawsuits not for environmental reasons, but because people just don’t like them and they don’t like the result and the fact that these projects were approved.
So, this law will avoid that kind of anti-environmental regulation that we’ve seen.”
According to San Francisco Transit Municipal Transit Agency Director Jeff Tumlin, since SB 288 went into effect, the agency has been able to move several projects forward.
“Thanks to SB 288, we were able to cut through what would have been years of pointless red tape and instead design and implement projects within a matter of weeks or months as opposed to years. Projects that are right now delivering results for transit and for safety and without SB 288, we would still be in a pointless bureaucratic process,” he said.
What’s the matter with this meat head.How can you hold the public to these rules and you are going to change the rules for you and your clowns.Give this idiot a one way ticket out of this country.
Leave It To Wiener could be a sit-com if it weren’t for the fact that he is an actual politician with actual power to do things. Many of us know that CEQA (Cal enviro quality act) is designed to punish any project the far-Left does not like. Either EVERY project should be subject to it, or else none should.
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The proposed legislation would create another statutory exemption rather than a categorical exemption. Other statutory exceptions includes affordable housing which in my opinion has more of a negative effect on community character than transit work.
Football stadiums, huge tech campuses, and government projects get relief, but every other project has to adhere to CEQA? Why even have the law if it can be arbitrarily enforced, or disregarded? Organized labor, big business, politicians, lawyers, and the environmentalists, all benefit from the current CEQA law. The average citizen and the environment, not so much.
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It’s not arbitrary per se. Rather, the proposed law would create a classification of transit projects that could potentially be exempted.
A project can be easily challenged under a “fair argument”. Courts have ruled and have deferred in favor of appellants that an agency cannot simply exempt a project for convenience if a fair argument can be made that the project would have a significant impact on the environment.
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…”you should not have to go through unending environmental review. That is counterproductive….”
Glad he admits that, so get rid of all of them, could help your housing situation. What a goof.
Just get rid of the pointless red tape (as you put it) so all projects can move quickly.
Typical hypocrisy of the Democrats: rules for thee not for me & my projects.
“… we were able to cut through what would have been years of pointless red tape and instead design and implement projects within a matter of weeks or months as opposed to years. Projects that are right now delivering results for transit and for safety and without SB 288, we would still be in a pointless bureaucratic process,”
So because it was inconvenient and slowed them down they get to side step what businesses are forced to go thru.
As DEMs continue to be baffled as to why companies leave this state ?
If Wiener’s for it, I’m against it.
@Cellophane
Man, you got that right.
…so they can make their own rules of course …agree with you Cellophane +1
So the environmental/climate change politicians are worried about red tape. Heck, their lives are red tape, their strategies are red tape. They use red tape to grind progress to a halt. Red tape is their currency!
The hipocracy is so flagrant. It’s obvious they don’t care about climate change, they care about their pet projects. Eliminating accountability may cause projects to be non-climate friendly after completion. They don’t care.
Surely there must be a place in the Biden administration for these people, they would fit right in.