Will California reform its unique-and entrenched-environmental review law?

摘要

This past spring, when the working-class Los Angeles suburbs of Carson and Inglewood were doing battle over which city would be the first to build a National Football League stadium, the biggest question each one faced was not how to pay for the stadiums, which teams would move in, or whether the NFL would approve either deal. →Typical of California real estate development projects, the biggest question was how the cities were going to navigate the intricacies of the California Environmental Quality Act quickly enough to move their projects forward on the NFL's schedule.→A stadium is a huge development project and under CEQA-California's version of the National Environmental Policy Act-it would almost certainly require the preparation of an environmental impact report. An EIR for such a large project would take at least a year and, in all likelihood, cost millions of dollars to complete. The draft EIR would be circulated to all interested parties, who would then make comments that the cities would have to respond to. And in the end, the city or the teams would probably have to provide millions of dollars of "mitigations"-measures to mitigate the impact of the stadium on the community and the environment-which could cripple or sink the project.