Pamela Flick

This blog presents a recent op-ed in Vanguard News that explores Senate Bill 131 and its impact on wildlife and endangered species. 

In June, Governor Newsom worked with legislative leadership to push through SB 131 as a budget trailer bill. SB 131 was touted as a companion to AB 130, and both bills were sold as streamlining measures to the California Environmental Quality Act to rapidly accelerate housing development. While the verdict is still out on how much new housing AB 130 will actually create, it was indeed a housing bill. But SB 131 mostly does not address housing.

Instead, its most controversial feature was a CEQA exemption for a vague category of polluting industrial projects known as “advanced manufacturing.” Exempt projects include battery and energy storage manufacturing, lithium mining, defense and aerospace manufacturing, and semi-conductor and electronics manufacturing.

While innovation and new technology is important to California and our quest for clean energy, these types of projects still produce pollution that should, at least, be disclosed and evaluated when sited near communities and sensitive habitats. These kinds of projects typically involve hazardous chemicals and solvents, yet SB 131 provides no environmental guardrails or conditions. Further, most of the “advanced manufacturing” facilities will be built in and around disadvantaged communities that are already burdened by decades of industrial pollution.

Neither the public nor most legislators saw the language of SB 131, or knew about the “advanced manufacturing” exemption, until Friday, June 27, just three days before it was signed into law. At the Senate Budget Committee hearing on Monday, June 30, many senators expressed serious concerns about the likelihood of increased air and water pollution in their communities.

In response, the bill’s author (Sen. Wiener), Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire, and other legislators committed to move clean-up legislation through the Legislature this year to address the serious concerns around the impacts of this new “advanced manufacturing” exemption. 

Legislators’ commitment to fix SB 131 reflects the bill’s extreme nature. Never in 50 years has the state enacted a broad CEQA exemption for polluting industrial projects. Given California’s position of economic strength, it’s hard to understand why it is needed.

As Governor Newsom himself has been proudly touting, “California leads the nation” as the top state for Fortune 500 companies, new business starts, manufacturing, venture capital funding, high-tech businesses, and agriculture. Our state now boasts the fourth largest economy in the world.

So why are we removing common sense requirements regarding polluting industrial activities that threaten public health and the environment?

Tellingly, the state has already classified numerous metal recycling plants as “advanced manufacturing” facilities—and history shows that environmental review is essential for these projects. If such facilities are exempt from CEQA, public health in already-overburdened communities will suffer, as they’ll have no chance to understand or advocate for measures to reduce pollution.

Of equal concern is SB 131’s failure to exclude from the new exemption projects that are located on habitat for endangered and threatened species. The result could imperil sensitive species throughout California.

Because “advanced manufacturing” projects won’t require CEQA review, the public won’t be notified when a semi-conductor or aerospace manufacturing facility is built on sensitive habitat, and there will be no requirement to mitigate its impacts on species. That means that we will end up losing more habitat for declining wildlife, driving even more species to need protections. California is a world-renowned biodiversity hotspot, and our state should be doing more to avoid driving species into extinction—not giving polluting developers a pass to destroy imperiled species’ habitat.  

This new framework represents a major reversal of state policy. Many legislators who felt pressured to vote for SB 131 in order to pass the state budget said this provision, too, must be fixed before the end of the legislative session. Notably, other bills that have allowed major exemptions for the environmental review process under CEQA do exclude projects located on sensitive habitat. For example, 2017’s SB 35 (Wiener) and this year’s AB 130 require projects on such habitat to undergo environmental review. Why should advanced manufacturing projects not be held to the same standard?

Time is running out to fix SB 131. Clean-up legislation must be enacted before the legislative deadline to pass bills on September 12. Nearly one-third of California’s legislators have  already signed a letter calling on leadership to “expeditiously pursue legislation to address outstanding concerns on the public resources budget trailer bill, SB 131.”

California can’t afford the abundance of pollution this dangerous law will bring. Nor should we threaten more of our state’s imperiled fish and wildlife. The legislature must act quickly to fix SB 131. 

Author

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Pam Flick

Pamela Flick

California Program Director
Pam manages Defenders’ California Program and engages on a variety of issues statewide, including gray wolf recovery, responsible renewable energy planning and development, forest resilience and fire restoration, and advancing conservation of imperiled species and natural communities.