by Eric Biber : legalplanet.wordpress.com – excerpt
The State Senate recently passed its version of CEQA reform. Having looked over the bill, it’s much better than I feared. What seems to be the most important change is a move towards adopting standard setting in CEQA – i.e., making generalized determinations about what levels of certain kinds of impacts are “significant” such that full CEQA review is needed. As Ethan noted earlier, this has been a regular push on the part of industry and business, and he suspected that it might have been a Trojan horse for pushing fracking in California. (One version of this standard setting would have said that compliance with existing regulatory standards meant no significant impact – which would mean that for activities where there are not regulatory standards, such as much of fracking in California, there might have been no detailed CEQA review.)… (more)
SF CEQA 