by Robert Cruickshank/California High Speed Rail Blog
In a Sacramento Bee op-ed yesterday, former California Governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and Gray Davis made a case for reforming the California Environmental Quality Act. When you add in Governor Jerry Brown, and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has in the past expressed support for CEQA changes) you’ve got all five living California governors, with nearly 40 years of executive leadership, lined up behind changing the landmark law.
These former governors are absolutely right when they note that CEQA is sometimes abused by people who do not have environmentally friendly or sustainable goals in mind. We’ve seen this repeatedly, whether it’s a lawsuit blocking a bike master plan or the now-settled lawsuit from Chowchilla that used CEQA to attack the high speed rail project route because the tracks stood between the city and its desired sprawl. And transit advocates have repeatedly witnessed NIMBYs conflating their own aesthetic judgements with “environmental quality” and using that to delay or make more costly important transportation projects.
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