Help Prevent Further Limitations on Local Zoning

Assembly Bill 1001 (C. Garcia) will effectively be a housing and private development mitigation tool by putting limitations on local zoning. It puts up new legal barriers for local agencies to contend with by creating new guidelines that will further slow the development of new housing. While we support the continuance of environmental justice throughout California, AB 1001 is not a proper path to take when considering the gravity of California’s housing crisis.

CEQA has already enacted significant environmental reform but with this, we have seen lead agencies struggle to meet the demand for housing, especially in low-income communities. AB 1001 will make a bad situation worse through the limitation of local agencies' discretionary ability to maintain a housing supply in their communities.

AB 1001 is using backchannel reasoning and arguments to expand the CEQA. It uses discriminatory land-use policies to enforce its environmental justice policies. Its language enforces that fair treatment and meaningful involvement of people of all races, cultures, incomes, and national origins while also making clear that all mitigation in reference to water or air quality impacts is directly mitigated in any affected disadvantaged communities.

Furthermore, it uses CEQA’s current environmental standards new subjective standards, such as whether the agency’s findings were “fair” or “meaningfully involving.” The problem with all of this is that it opens a legal doorway by which anyone can sue under the pretenses listed above. These lawsuits will slow housing development down putting up more and more legal red tape over local agencies' discretionary ability to develop its land.

CEQA already requires local agencies to follow an extensively complex list of rules and procedures when a local agency wants to develop the land. Since CEQA implementation agencies have had to follow a plethora of guidelines that directly address the environmental impact of development and concerns of its citizens. It mandates that an agency must feasibly mitigate significant toxic air contaminants and water quality impacts from a proposed project on all communities including disadvantaged communities where there may be a correlation between the project’s impacts and that population. The language used such as, “disadvantaged communities,” asserts that other affected people or resources are not deserving of protection.

With CEQA already on the books, it simply doesn’t make sense to add onto existing laws with legislation like AB 1001 which would create drastically bloated legal liability for local governments by mitigating their discretionary ability to dictate what projects should or shouldn’t be approved. AB 1001 language suggests that there may be many contradictory rules and regulations to CEQA which would affect how and where environmental rules/regulations may be applied to reduce the impact on disadvantaged communities that may have never been impacted in the first place.