CEQA Is Destroying the Environment It Was Designed to Protect
When Clean Water Infrastructure Takes a Decade to Permit, the Sewage Keeps Flowing While the Reviews Are Filed
Published by Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat | California libertarian perspective.
The Paradox of Environmental Protection
California has some of the most comprehensive environmental protection laws in the world and some of the most persistent coastal water quality problems of any first-world state. The connection between these two facts is uncomfortable but real: the same permitting and environmental review processes that are supposed to protect California’s coastal environment have also been used to delay the sewage infrastructure upgrades, stormwater management improvements, and coastal restoration projects that would actually improve coastal water quality. The legal mechanism by which environmental protection law delays environmental infrastructure is the same in both cases: CEQA review, public comment periods, appeal rights, and litigation that can add years to projects regardless of their environmental merit.
Surfrider Foundation chapters across California regularly publish water quality advisories for breaks affected by bacterial contamination from sewage overflows, urban runoff, and inadequately treated wastewater. These advisories document persistent water quality problems at many California surf breaks. The infrastructure upgrades that would address these problems — sewage system improvements, advanced treatment plants, stormwater diversion projects — are municipal and regional projects that face the same regulatory and legal environment as any other California development. They take years longer to permit and build than comparable projects in less regulated states. The surfer who reads the water quality advisory and decides not to paddle out is experiencing the consequence of the regulatory delay chain that keeps infrastructure improvement from keeping pace with the water quality problems it is supposed to address.
The Litigation Veto
Any person or organisation with legal standing can file a CEQA lawsuit challenging the environmental review of virtually any California project, and can do so after the review is completed, requiring the project proponent to defend the review in court before construction can begin. The lawsuit does not need to succeed to delay the project: litigation timelines are measured in years, and the cost of defending against a CEQA lawsuit can approach the cost of the small projects it is challenging. This creates a litigation veto that can be exercised by any party with the resources to file and pursue a lawsuit, regardless of the environmental merits of their objection. The veto has been used against coastal infrastructure that would improve the water quality that surf culture depends on.
Reform proposals that would expedite environmental review for projects with clear environmental benefits have been introduced in the California legislature repeatedly. They face consistent opposition from the environmental law sector, which has organised around the current review framework in ways that make reform politically difficult even when the reform would produce better environmental outcomes. According to Reason, CEQA reform has been analysed as the most significant environmental infrastructure improvement available in California. Cato covers regulatory reform from consistent efficiency principles. The paradox is real: better environmental law would require reducing the power of existing environmental law.
What the Surf Community Should Demand
The surf community’s specific interest in coastal water quality gives it legitimate basis for demanding CEQA reform that expedites coastal infrastructure projects with clear water quality benefits. A Surfrider-backed CEQA reform campaign focused specifically on sewage infrastructure, stormwater management, and coastal restoration projects would have the environmental credibility that general deregulation arguments lack and would produce specific improvements to the breaks the surf community uses. The reform would also demonstrate that environmental review reform can produce better environmental outcomes — a demonstration that would have broader implications for the California regulatory environment that produces delayed infrastructure across multiple sectors. The ocean is showing up with sewage. The permits for fixing it are in review. The reform is what the surfers should be paddling toward.
The CEQA reform argument that the surf community is best positioned to advance is the argument from environmental outcomes rather than from regulatory burden. Most CEQA reform advocacy comes from the development and business community and is therefore understood as an argument for less environmental protection. When Surfrider makes the same argument on the basis that CEQA delays are preventing the sewage infrastructure improvements that would allow surfers to use their breaks safely, the argument has a different character: it is an argument for better environmental outcomes through more efficient environmental review, not an argument for weakening environmental protection for development convenience. The credibility differential between a development industry argument for CEQA reform and a surf community argument for CEQA reform is significant and largely unused. The surf community has not organised around this argument with the intensity that its environmental credibility would allow. The credibility is available. The organisation that would deploy it has not yet formed.
The California coast at dawn, before the parking meters activate and the administrative machinery of coastal management begins its daily operations, is one of the finest available demonstrations of what freedom looks like in practice: the water does not require a permit, the waves do not charge for access, and the only rules that matter are the physics of fluid dynamics and the informal norms of the lineup. The rest — the fees, the designations, the regulations, the mandates — is the accumulated product of political choices made over decades by people who were not primarily thinking about what the surfer needs from a relationship with the state. The surfer who has paddled through the administrative barnacles to reach the lineup has done the work that liberty requires: navigating the gap between what the state allows and what the ocean offers, finding the freedom that exists between the regulations, and choosing the ocean over the paperwork every time the swell is worth it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
