Last week, a California appeals court brought legislators’ plans for a new office annex on the state Capitol grounds to a screeching halt when it ruled the $1.3 billion project had been greenlit without the requisite analysis of its environmental effects.
That ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Save Our Capitol!—a motley coalition of small business groups, taxpayer advocates, preservationists, and environmentalists—arguing that the public had not been given adequate opportunity to comment on the final design of the office complex and that the state hadn’t put enough thought into less environmentally impactful designs.
Giving the unincorporated group the right to sue is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impacts of their projects and, where possible, mitigate those impacts. That sounds simple enough. The original intent was to force the government to stop and listen to public feedback before paving over wetlands with a new highway project.
But the “citizen-enforced” law gives anyone the ability to file administrative appeals and lawsuits arguing that any of a long list of a project’s impacts on natural, physical, cultural, and/or historic resources had not been adequately studied.
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