PCL’s Capital Insider for May, 2025
SB 607 – A Monumental Undermining of California’s Environmental Bill of Rights
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is California’s primary environmental public process law, enabling agencies to understand the impacts of their projects and giving communities a voice in the planning decisions that affect them. This year, like almost every year, we have over 70 CEQA-related bills we are tracking on our CEQA Watchlist. Not all of these proposals are necessarily bad, but many are simply attempts to roll back CEQA’s protections or to exempt certain projects from CEQA altogether. SB 607 by State Senator Scott Wiener, however, poses an unprecedented threat to this valuable public process. If enacted, SB 607 would upend the very basis of CEQA across and greatly inhibit the ability to provide adequate environmental review for nearly every project type.
PCL helped create CEQA and has helped protect the process ever since, but PCL has also not been entirely unbending on questions of how to improve the CEQA process and how it’s used. PCL, in concert with many cross-interest stakeholders, has proposed our own CEQA reforms aimed at making the process more efficient, and we have been constructive in helping shape proposals that would streamline CEQA for the right things in the right place, like affordable housing and supportive infrastructure in low-VMT areas. SB 607, however, is not an improvement to CEQA. 607 will fundamentally degrade community access to the decisions being made around them, produce tremendous legal uncertainty, and cause more litigation, not less.
The proponents of SB 607 claim that it is a “surgical” approach to speed infill housing review, but this utterly misrepresents the bill. Infill housing in urban areas is already largely exempt from CEQA review, and though the bill makes a narrow exclusion for distribution centers and oil and gas infrastructure, it weakens CEQA for all other projects. These include freeways, airports, railyards, shipping terminals, office buildings, shopping malls, sports complexes, dams, sewage plants, mines, incinerators, power plants, prisons, and massive mixed-use developments on farmland, sensitive habitat, or in high wildfire danger zones.
This bill has several major components, all of which are problematic in varying degrees, but here are the highlights of our most significant concerns:
Most concerningly, SB 607 would radically alter the “fair argument” standard used to determine when an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) is required for a project. Currently, an EIR must be prepared when there is a fair argument, based on substantial evidence, that the project would have a potentially significant impact – in other words, if there’s a solid reason to believe that the project could result in significant harms, the agency must study those harms in an EIR. If there are no impacts, or the impacts are mitigatable, a negative declaration (neg dec) or mitigated neg dec will be prepared.
SB 607 would turn this standard upside-down. Under SB 607, if an agency can put forward substantial evidence that the project will not have significant impacts – regardless of the strength of counterarguments indicating the project may well cause major and irreversible harms – the project will be funneled into the neg dec process and avert any CEQA responsibility to even study its environmental impacts.
Beyond the upheaval of the “fair argument” standard, SB 607 also introduces a “near miss” pathway for a project that did not qualify for an exemption to still bypass significant and needed environmental review, so long as the project “almost” aligns with the criteria for an existing categorical or statutory exemption. Specifically, if a project would qualify for an exemption “but for a single condition”, the scope of CEQA review shall be limited to the effects of that single condition. Nothing in this bill requires a project to be substantively similar to the exemption it claims to “almost” qualify for. This proposal is unworkable and attempts to rewrite CEQA in ways that make no sense.
Statutory and categorical exemptions are not uniform in structure or content, but highly varied. Each has been developed to address specific circumstances and contains unique configurations of elements, conditions, clauses, and definitions, which, together, define the scope of the exemption. Many exemptions are not structured as a list of conditions, making this provision impossible to apply rationally. Where an exemption does list mandatory requirements, the Legislature or the Natural Resources Agency has determined that all of these conditions must be met to ensure minimal harm. Nothing in the statutory or categorical exemptions suggests that they were ever intended to limit CEQA review for projects that are “almost” exempt, opening up this portion of SB 607 to dangerous potential consequences.
This “near miss” section also adds new language to eliminate, for certain projects, the duty to discuss alternatives, as well as cumulative and growth-inducing impacts. These features are at the heart of CEQA’s value to the public. There is simply no rationale for eliminating these core functions from EIRs for projects that are not exempt from CEQA by definition, particularly when the reasons the project is not exempt could be extremely consequential.
Finally, SB 607 would amend CEQA’s requirements for the contents of the administrative record – to the detriment of transparency in public decision-making – by excluding all internal agency electronic communications, including emails, that were not presented to the final decision-maker. Given that most communications are now done electronically, this is a major change, and it raises significant concerns about cherry-picking the information presented to the public and accountability in government decision-making.
Here is a more detailed briefing document that includes several examples of projects that show how the EIR process made a difference in communities and natural areas throughout the state. Read the group letter signed by 127 environmental and environmental justice groups, detailing why we oppose SB 607. PCL helped to write and champion CEQA’s initial passage, but numerous bills are introduced every year to weaken the CEQA process. PCL works relentlessly with stakeholders across the state to protect CEQA as a vital tool for communities and environmental protection, as well as trying to update CEQA to be more efficient and effective, but SB 607 goes too far.
Across industries and across the state, SB 607 will reduce transparency for new projects, obscure the potential harms to communities and biodiversity for a wide scope of harmful activities. SB 607 will uproot the core democratic principles of the California Environmental Quality Act, and PCL is committed to fighting for our communities and the environment because we know if these protections go away, we may never get them back.
SB 607 is currently sitting in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Please contact your senator, Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire, and the Senate Appropriations Committee. Take Action Now.
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