California Passes Law Requiring Permits for Permits, Permit Office Opens to Issue Permit Application Forms

State legislature modernises regulatory process by adding preliminary permit review stage before permit review stage

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Law and Its Mechanism

SACRAMENTO — California Governor Newsom signed legislation this week establishing a preliminary environmental compliance review process for certain coastal development projects that had previously only required a full environmental compliance review process, adding a pre-review stage to the review stage that follows the pre-application consultation that precedes the application that requires the permit that allows the project to begin. The legislation’s supporters describe it as streamlining the environmental review process by identifying compliance issues earlier. Project developers describe it as the same process with an additional step at the beginning.

The Streamlining Paradox

California has been streamlining its environmental permitting process through legislative action since approximately 1997, producing a sequence of streamlining reforms that have individually reduced specific friction points and collectively produced a permitting timeline that is now longer than it was before the first streamlining reform. The streamlining paradox — each individual reform reduces a specific problem while the aggregate of reforms increases the overall burden — is documented in academic literature on regulatory accumulation and is not unique to California, but California has produced more data points for the literature than any comparable jurisdiction.

The Surfer Permit Experience

The surfer who wants to construct a simple deck addition to a beach-adjacent property in California receives the streamlined process in its current form, which is: pre-application consultation, environmental compliance pre-review, permit application, environmental impact assessment if triggered, Coastal Commission review if in the coastal zone, local planning commission hearing, building permit application, inspection schedule, and certificate of occupancy. The deck can be built in two weekends. The permits take eighteen months. The California Coastal Commission manages the coastal development permit process whose timeline the legislation is improving. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office publishes independent assessment of regulatory reform legislation’s actual effects on permitting timelines. Both confirm the situation described, which continues.

California, Freedom, and the Surfer

The surfer as libertarian avatar — the person who wakes up early, reads the forecast, makes a decision about where to go, accepts the consequences of that decision including the rip currents, the crowds, the parking tickets, and the occasional shark, and does not require the government to make the decision or accept the consequences for them — is one of the more coherent applications of libertarian values to a recreational activity. The problem is that the California that produced the surfing culture has also produced the regulatory frameworks that the surfer navigates, and the regulatory frameworks are there because the alternative was the specific outcomes that unregulated California coastline, water, and land use produced in the period before the Coastal Act, the Clean Water Act, and the environmental regulations that the libertarian critique of California simultaneously benefits from and complains about. The Reason Foundation makes the argument. The California Coastal Commission makes the coast accessible. Both are part of the same California.

The Week and Its Structural Context

The stories documented above are specific events produced by structural conditions that predate them and that will continue after them. The journalism industry structural condition — the collapse of the commercial advertising-supported newspaper model and the incomplete emergence of the digital subscription and nonprofit models that are replacing it — has been producing the specific events documented above for approximately two decades and will continue producing them for at least another decade as the transition completes itself at the pace that industry transitions complete themselves, which is slower than the pace at which the casualties of the transition occur and faster than the pace at which the replacements reach the scale the casualties occupied.

The California structural condition — a state whose progressive politics and libertarian geography are in permanent productive tension, whose regulatory frameworks reflect the progressive politics and whose economy reflects the libertarian geography, and whose residents navigate both simultaneously — has been producing the specific events documented above since the state established itself as the primary laboratory for American regulatory innovation in both directions. The regulatory framework expands. The economy grows. The surfers park illegally. The permits take longer. The seawalls get approved while the science documents their effects. All of this is California in 2026, which is California as it has been for forty years and will be for forty more.

The Guardian California and the Los Angeles Times provide the baseline coverage of the California structural condition. The Poynter Institute provides the baseline for the journalism structural condition. The satire provides the angle on both. All three are necessary parts of the complete information environment. The column contributes what it can to each.

The week closes here. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfection is honest. The honesty is the standard. The standard continues next week, applied to the next week events from the same structural conditions, which continue regardless of the week or the documentation or the column that attempts to document them. The record grows. The conditions continue. Both are real. Both matter. The column returns. The analysis holds. The record is accurate. The situation continues beyond this week.

More at https://www.theonion.com.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism