On February 20, 2025, Senator Scott Wiener introduced Senate Bill No. 607 (SB 607), a proposed law that is relatively short in text length, but which would engender major CEQA reforms if enacted as currently drafted. The bill would add three new, and amend two existing, statutory sections of CEQA, as discussed below.
Proposed New Public Resources Code Section 21080.08
Subdivision (a) of this proposed new statute would entirely exempt from CEQA “a rezoning that is consistent with an approved housing element” while subdivision (b) would clarify that the exemption “does not apply to a rezoning that would allow for the construction of a distribution center or for oil and gas infrastructure.” (As will be seen below, the latter qualification – essentially excluding warehouse and fossil fuel projects from the proposed reforms – applies to all parts of the proposed legislation.)
Proposed Amendments to Public Resources Code Section 21080.1
These proposed amendments would add several paragraphs making two significant substantive changes to the current statute. First, if a lead agency determines after a preliminary review that a project would qualify for a categorical exemption except for failing to meet a single condition of the exemption – while determining it meets all the other conditions – then the “agency shall limit the scope of an environmental impact report [for the project] to the condition of [the] categorical exemption that the lead agency determines... disqualifies the project from eligibility under the categorical exemption[.]” This proposed limitation on an EIR’s scope would thus not apply to projects “disqualified from a categorical exemption for failing to meet two or more conditions of the... exemption,” nor would it apply to projects related to a distribution center or oil and gas infrastructure. Limiting the analytic scope of certain EIRs in this way would appear to significantly alter current law requiring a “full EIR” whenever even a single potential impact renders a negative declaration (or exemption) unavailable. (See, e.g., Farmland Protection Alliance v. County of Yolo (2021) 71 Cal.App.5th 300, 308-311, and cases cited, and my 11/8/21 post on that case here for a fuller discussion of this issue as it relates to negative declarations; see also my 9/3/24 post on Westside Los Angeles Neighbors Network v. City of Los Angeles (2024) 104 Cal.App.5th 223, which can be found here, for a discussion of this issue as it relates to partially exempt projects.)
The proposed...
