Press Release

Senator Wiener, Assemblymember Wicks Applaud Governor Newsom’s Support for their CEQA Reform Bills

Modernizing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) will slash delays, onerous cost increases, and frivolous lawsuits on projects ranging from affordable housing, to childcare and healthcare centers, to food banks and small businesses. Combined, SB 607 and AB 609 are the strongest permitting reform California has seen in decades.

SACRAMENTO – This morning, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he supports the strongest ever reforms of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a major California permitting and environmental review law. Governor Newsom proposed to include Senator Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) Senate Bill 607 and Assemblymember Wicks’s (D-Oakland) Assembly Bill 609 as part of the budget. SB 607 makes several significant reforms to CEQA to reduce the risk of abuse, and AB 609 creates a broad CEQA exemption for infill housing projects.

While CEQA provides important protections against serious environmental harms, its overbroad scope has caused delays, onerous cost increases, and frivolous lawsuits on projects ranging from affordable housing, to childcare and healthcare centers, to food banks and small businesses — projects that pose no meaningful threat to the environment. Even the threat of a CEQA lawsuit is enough to tank or shrink many projects, especially those in low-margin industries like housing and childcare. These unintended consequences famously led former Governor Jerry Brown to call reforming CEQA “the Lord’s work.”

Last fall, Assemblymember Wicks convened the Select Committee on Permitting Reform to study ways to streamline permitting approvals for a range of projects in California. The recommendations in the Select Committee’s Final Report have been incorporated into over 20 bills authored by several legislators as part of the Fast Track Housing package.

Senator Wiener issued the following statement in response to the Governor’s announcement:

“Californians are sick and tired of the endless delays and cost increases caused by our broken permitting system, which is why we introduced AB 609 and SB 607. These bills are critical permitting reform proposals, and we applaud Governor Newsom for including them in his proposed budget.

“CEQA was enacted with an admirable intention: To require government officials to consider ways to mitigate serious environmental impacts from government projects. We strongly support the need to mitigate genuinely serious environmental harms. Yet, in half century since CEQA’s enactment, courts have expanded CEQA into a powerful tool anyone with a lawyer can use to wage procedural war against projects they don’t like — even environmentally beneficial projects and projects critical for California’s economy.

“This is not good government. When procedural barriers prevent public officials from delivering on key community needs, people rightly lose faith in government to solve their problems. When procedural hurdles stifle the housing, childcare centers, and clean energy, and jobs we need, the entire community suffers.

“By clearing away outdated procedural hurdles, we can address California’s outrageous cost of living, grow California’s economy, and help the government solve the most pressing problems facing our state. We look forward to working with Governor Newsom and our legislative colleagues to advance these two important bills and to secure an affordable and abundant future for California.”

Assemblymember Wicks issued the following statement in response to the Governor’s announcement:

“By championing the strongest CEQA reforms in decades, Governor Newsom is showing that California is ready to meet this moment. Embracing these efforts to put housing in environmentally responsible locations doesn’t just tackle our housing crisis — it also advances our climate goals, and delivers on the promise of a government that solves problems. It’s time to refine CEQA for the modern age, and I’m proud to work with the Governor to make these long-overdue changes a reality.”

Each step of the CEQA process is subject to appeals and lawsuits that can increase project costs and time because of the extremely broad scope and standards of relevancy CEQA requires. It’s not unusual for CEQA lawsuits to take three to four years and millions of dollars to resolve, while appeals regularly take six months. Larger and more complex projects go through lengthier and more expensive CEQA reviews. 

The breadth and vagueness of CEQA means that the law has in practice allowed essentially anyone who can hire a lawyer to use CEQA to obstruct projects they do not like for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment:

  • Two residents recently filed a CEQA lawsuit to halt construction on the Alameda Food Bank (AFB). AFB’s Executive Director said she was afraid lengthy litigation would result in the Food Bank’s “inability” to provide services for 1,200 families, school lunches, and food donations to unhoused people.
  • In 2024, three neighbors sued to stop a childcare center from opening a new facility in Napa, which would have created 120 additional childcare slots in a community facing a severe shortage. The delay caused the owner to lose a Small Business Administration grant she had secured for the expansion, and she is still working to identify replacement funding to complete the project.
  • In South San Francisco, opponents of a new Planned Parenthood filed a CEQA lawsuit. Even though the project fit cleanly into several categorical exemptions, opponents argued that they had failed to account for the environmental impact of protests at the proposed new facility.  The final decision by the Court of Appeal was issued more than four years after the initial project approval.
  • Disgruntled neighbors filed a CEQA lawsuit to stop the construction of Liberty Lane Apartments in Redlands, a 98 percent affordable housing project primarily for veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, as well as for individuals with special needs and other low-income households.
  • Susanville filed a CEQA lawsuit to stop the closure of a state prison because the state hadn’t considered the economic impact of the prison’s closure on the town.
  • Local businesses sued to stop 200 tiny homes to shelter the unhoused in downtown Sacramento. Their justification was that the city of Sacramento “didn’t take into account the environmental impact or health implications of placing the homeless under the W/X freeway” when the homeless people would otherwise be living unhoused, likely near these same freeways.
  • The San Francisco Board of Supervisors used a CEQA appeal to block 494 units of housing proposed on a transit-adjacent Nordstroms valet parking lot at 469 Stevenson St. in downtown San Francisco on the premise that the $750,000 CEQA review completed by the city didn’t adequately address the gentrification impacts of the project. The project will likely not move forward even if it gets approval, now as construction costs have risen too high after the years of delay and attendant costs.

SB 607

SB 607 makes a number of targeted reforms to strengthen the operational efficiency of CEQA, including:

  • For projects falling short of meeting eligibility for a categorical or statutory exemption by a lead agency, SB 607 focuses the scope of the subsequent environmental review to the disqualifying reason and the facts the action or proceeding relied upon that disqualified the project from the exemption. 
  • Aligns the standard of review for a lead agency’s determination to adopt a Negative Declaration (ND) or a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) to parity with the existing standard of review for Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs). 
  • Focuses CEQA review on the most germane administrative records by excluding communications of persons tangential or far removed from project decision-making, with specified exemptions. 

SB 607 also focuses specifically on reducing delays on housing and other urban infill projects by:

  • Clarifying the existing Class 32 urban infill exemption to make it usable. 
  • Exempting re-zonings that are consistent with an already approved housing element from CEQA, recognizing that local jurisdictions must undergo the CEQA process as a part of the housing element adoption process. 

AB 609

AB 609 creates a broad CEQA exemption for environmentally friendly infill housing projects that meet local zoning, density, and objective standards. The bill removes duplicative environmental review for projects in areas already planned and approved for housing — streamlining the process for homes in walkable, transit-accessible, and climate-smart locations.

To qualify, projects must be on sites less than 20 acres in size, not located on environmentally sensitive or hazardous lands, and meet minimum density thresholds (15 units per acre in urban areas, 10 in suburban, and 5 in rural). These requirements help ensure new housing is built where it has the lowest environmental impact and the greatest public benefit.

By removing CEQA barriers for projects that already comply with local plans, AB 609 increases certainty, cuts red tape, and encourages production in the exact places where communities have already said they want new housing to go — helping California meet both its housing and climate goals.

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