Gov. Gavin Newsom and California legislators passed a major reform of the California Environmental Quality Act on Monday. The new laws remove a key point of leverage for project opponents that has been embedded for more than a half-century in California's development regime.
This is an interesting one. The old law allowed ANY challenge to delay building construction, as long as it had a basis in environmental protection. It was primarily used by NIMBYs to block apartment buildings near houses, or by businesses to protect their service area from competition. It would cause builders years of paperwork headaches just to get where they would have been at the beginning. It isn’t even setting rules for what studies need to be done to protect the environment, just that if someone challenges your project based on environmental rules then a judge has to put a hold on it while studies are done to show things are fine.