by Edward Ring
Trump’s executive order highlights how CEQA’s red tape fuels California wildfires, pushing for reforms to restore balance and prioritize safety over bureaucracy.
"For weeks, residents of the Los Angeles area have watched raging fires consume their homes, belongings, beloved pets, and childhood memories. Almost immediately, firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.”
– Excerpt from Presidential Executive Order, January 24, 2025
The executive order issued by President Trump in response to the Los Angeles wildfires is the first step in what promises to be an extraordinary effort by his administration to beat some sense back into California’s environmental policies. Trump has “threatened to withhold federal disaster aid for wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles unless California leaders change the state’s approach on its management of water.” Unlike previous presidents, it is quite possible that Trump will make good on his threats.
The Democrats who run California may decide to take Trump seriously, or they may merely use his remarks as additional fodder for performative litigation against the Trump administration. But regardless of how they react, it doesn’t change the fact that environmentalism run amok has inflicted grievous harm on the state. It has made California unaffordable at the same time as it has moved beyond helping the environment to actively harming the environment. The fires in Los Angeles are the latest proof.
Anyone familiar with the consequences of environmentalist extremism in California will almost invariably point to one particular law as the biggest culprit, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), originally enacted by the state legislature in 1970. At that time, it was the first legislation of its kind in the nation, if not the world. Its original intent was to “inform government decision-makers and the public about the potential environmental effects of proposed activities and to prevent significant, avoidable environmental damage.”
Over the past half-century, CEQA has acquired layers of legislative updates and precedent-setting court rulings, warping it into a beast that denies clarity to developers and derails projects. When projects do make it through the CEQA gauntlet, the price of passage adds punitive costs in time and money. Knowing this will happen deters countless investors and developers from even trying to complete a project in the state.
The result of CEQA is higher prices and scarcity of everything, including housing, water, energy, and good jobs.
The reason CEQA has tied Californians up in knots is because it can apply to literally anything. Any water project, any energy project, or housing, manufacturing, retail, forestry, grazing—any activity whatsoever that makes so much as a scratch in the earth or releases a few molecules into the atmosphere or into a river or stream. Not only has CEQA turned into a bureaucratic obstacle, wherein voluminous reports and expert analyses have to be turned into multiple agencies for review and approval of projects, but in all these cases, any enterprising attorney can use CEQA provisions as the basis to file a lawsuit.
This is the reality of CEQA in California. Projects that are desperately needed are brought to a standstill, thanks to CEQA. Many developers and investors don’t even bother. Why should they, when there are 49 other states open for business?
No wonder there is no longer enough water for California’s cities and farmers, despite winter storms that dump tens of millions of acre-feet onto the state’s watersheds even in dry years. And no wonder the state’s forests and chaparral have turned into tinderboxes, despite the presence of Californians with the expert knowledge and capacity available to responsibly manage them.
The chart depicted below, courtesy of the California Department of
Conservation, depicts the CEQA process. If anything, this elaborate flow
chart understates what a project developer is up against thanks to
CEQA. There is rarely just one “responsible agency.” If any of these
agencies determine there are any flaws or omissions in the required
“Environmental Impact Report” (EIR), the process often has to be
restarted. The delays between inter-agency responses can consume months
if not years. The “public review period” leaves room for a 3rd party to
file a time-consuming lawsuit right up to the last minute before a
project is finally approved.
The irony would be funny if the results weren’t so tragic. CEQA, along with a host of other environmentalist-inspired overregulation in California, has led to gross mismanagement of California’s forests and chaparral. The results are catastrophic fires on a landscape that is overgrown way beyond historical norms. If you don’t allow natural fires to burn, and you don’t allow for human intervention in the form of logging, grazing, thinning, and controlled burns, you get superfires. The “climate crisis” has very little to do with it.
A prominent land use attorney who has spent decades fighting CEQA lawsuits offered the following specifications for meaningful CEQA reform:
“Until California housing costs are again affordable (3x median household income for-sale housing, and 4x median household income for rental housing—median by County), and until California’s supplemental poverty rate improves from the worst in the nation to no worse than the tenth poorest state in the nation, waive CEQA for housing, manufacturing and other employment projects, forest management, and infrastructure/utility and public service projects (“project”) which have (a) already been approved in whole or in part by a state or local agency in a plan, funding application or allocation, permit or other discretionary approval; (b) has already undergone a programmatic level of CEQA review because the project is an allowed use in a General Plan, Area Plan, Community Plan, Specific Plan, Master Plan, or Sustainable Communities Strategy. Limit standing for lawsuits seeking to enforce CEQA to elected law enforcement officials (district attorney for a project located within a county, and attorney general for a project located in multiple counties).”
The preceding solution may read as wonky to the uninitiated, but it also delivers the necessary detail and legal clarity for enforcement. It is one, and only one, potential condition that President Trump has the option to put onto delivery of relief funds to California.
Apart from federal aid administered directly and generously to homeowners and businesspeople harmed by the most recent fires in Los Angeles, President Trump should stick to his guns. Not one dime of disaster relief shall go to the State of California unless, among other things, they suspend CEQA until these conditions are met.
Edward Ring
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/29/president-trump-can-restore-sanity-to-californias-environmental-policies/
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