It isn’t every day that we find ourselves in agreement with someone who has been a lifelong intellectual adversary, so when it happens it’s something to note. Robert Freilich is a Los Angeles land-use lawyer, who before coming west was a law professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He and your faithful servant do not see eye to eye on most land-use controversies. We tend to take the side of beleaguered American property owners, whereas he is typically on the side of the government. We therefore found it remarkable that Professor Freilich delivered himself recently of a harsh judgment on California environmental laws. We have his permission to quote him, so here goes:
“Many attorneys, planners, architects, engineers, scientists, developers,
small businesses, business associations and governments in the state,
and many environmentalists are agreed that CEQA needs major reform.
Delays in the system are causing projects to suffer delays of 2 to 9
years to get EIRs approved, especially for (but not limited to) the
failure to compare the project with all “feasible” alternatives,
establish vague baseline analysis for existing mitigation, and the
tricky determination as to which parts of regional, general and
specific plan EIR findings can be incorporated, to eliminate
duplication of effort and cost. The law is so confused on these points
that it is a miracle that any EIR can survive its first round in the
courts without a remand to do it over again. Complicating this result
is the establishment of a specialized group of attorneys that initiate
litigation at the drop of a hat, primarily because the statute
authorizes attorney’s fees for any remand or reversal. Many community
associations and no growth environmentalists use the EIR litigation
process to delay and in many cases kill projects for little or no
environmental substance.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.