What matters to me today is CEQA on the ballot.
For decades, Sacramento has promised meaningful, comprehensive reform of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Yet each legislative session ends the same way: a patchwork of exemptions for politically favored projects, no structural fixes, and growing frustration from communities that see CEQA increasingly weaponized for reasons having little to do with the environment.
Into this vacuum steps the California Chamber of Commerce with a proposed ballot initiative—the Building an Affordable California Act—which attempts what the Legislature has repeatedly avoided: streamlining CEQA for essential projects while preserving core environmental protections. The measure declares that CEQA’s five-decade-old framework is “too slow, too bureaucratic, and too costly,” delaying clean energy, clean water, hospitals, schools, and especially housing. It creates firm deadlines for environmental review, narrows permissible alternatives analysis, constrains the administrative record, and imposes strict judicial review timelines. Lawsuits may still proceed, but on tighter rails, with remedies limited to the specific deficiency rather than full project stoppage.
CEQA has become the state’s all-purpose litigation tool: a bargaining chip, a delay tactic, a surrogate for local land-use battles. No ballot measure, however well-crafted, can fully correct decades of judicial expansion, political reliance, and stakeholder dependence on CEQA as leverage.
If the Legislature cannot act, voters may. But even this initiative may only begin, not complete, the reform CEQA desperately needs.
That’s what matters to me today in 250 words or less. What matters to you? I’d really like to know.