San Jose Business Journal might want to work on its reporting

Unfortunately, and in our opinion a case of poor journalism, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal took Stanford's press release on our lawsuit with Stanford and ran it nearly verbatim, with cursory changes and no attempt to contact us for our side of the story.

Below is something we sent to the Business Journal with the documentation about their lax reporting, but we've not heard back from them:

Your article on our organization's litigation against Stanford appears to be a barely-retouched version of Stanford's press release.  One can easily compare here:

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/02/08/daily82.html#comment

and here:

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2010/pr-stanford-county-trails-021110.html

I will note that we were never contacted by your newspaper for a contrasting position.  If, however, you have no problems running press releases as articles, ours is here:

http://www.greenfoothills.org/blog/2010/02/sad-legal-result-on-stanford-trails.html

Please contact me with any questions, comments, or new or altered articles on this issue, preferably sooner rather than later.

Sincerely,

Brian Schmidt

Committee for Green Foothills 

Action Alert! Oppose proposed legislation that would create 125 unplanned loopholes in California's environmental law!

(The Action Alert below was sent out to CGF members and supporters.  We will also put it up on the Action Alert section of the CGF website, but I'm reproducing it here so people can see it early.  -Brian)

Dear

Four identical bills in California's Assembly and Senate have the goal of exempting 125 public agency and private projects from the legal scrutiny required under California's premier environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  Please fax or call your Assembly Member and State Senator and ask them to oppose the bills for 125 loopholes in California's environmental law.

What’s Happening

Using the economic crisis as an excuse to reduce the environmental protection that makes California such a great place to work and live, proposed legislation:

ABX8 37 (Calderon & Nestande)

AB 1805 (Calderon & Nestande)

SBX8 42 (Correa & Cogdill)

SB 1010 (Correa & Cogdill)

would exempt 25 projects annually for five years from judicial review that enforces CEQA, a law that requires accurate disclosure of environmental impacts and reduces significant impacts when feasible.  Private developer projects that need permits as well as governmental projects would be eligible for exemption from the CEQA requirements that applies to all other Californians.  The obligation to prepare environmental review would still exist, but preparers would know in advance that no one could challenge them in court for preparing inadequate reviews that violate the law.  The 125 projects would be chosen by a state agency only after the law has passed.  The state agency is supposed to consider economic benefits from a project when making selections, without mention of environmental harms, and would likely choose the largest and most environmentally problematic projects for exemption from judicial review.

Why this is Important   

Protecting the high quality of life in California remains the best option for continuing to attract and retain business to our state.  Legislation like the ones proposed will increase traffic problems, promote sprawl, and worsen air pollution - all factors that drive businesses away and lower our quality of life.  The whole point of judicial review is to keep the preparers of environmental documents honest and accurate, an objective that is often missed even with the possibility of a judge examining them for accuracy.  Dropping that review eliminates the incentive for meaningful compliance with CEQA, and the end result may be an even broader attack against environmental protection in California.

What you can do

Please call or fax a short letter to your Assembly Member or State Senator.  Click here to find your representatives' names and phone numbers.  Please click on your representatives' name to find their fax number.

We recommend calls or faxes as they have more impact than emails.  Please let us know that you have written:  info@greenfoothills.org or fax us a copy (650) 968-8431.

To see the Committee for Green Foothills letter, click here.

Thanks for speaking up for our coastal wetlands and environmental protections!  Your voice does make a difference!

- The folks at Committee for Green Foothills

________________________________________________

Committee for Green Foothills

3921 East Bayshore Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303

Phone (650) 968-7243 Fax (650) 968-8431  

www.GreenFoothills.org

Letter to California legislature opposing bills that would drive 125 holes through CEQA

(CGF is sending the following letter to members of the California Assembly and State Senate.  -Brian)

February 23, 2010

The Honorable Lou Correa                                            The Honorable Dave Cogdill

State Legislature                                                             State Legislature

California State Capitol, Room 5052                                California State Capitol, Room 5097

Sacramento, CA 95814                                                   Sacramento, CA 95814

The Honorable Charles Calderon                                                The Honorable Brian Nestande

State Legislature                                                             State Legislature

California State Capitol, Room 2117                                California State Capitol, Room 4153

Sacramento, CA 95814                                                   Sacramento, CA 95814

Re:  ABX8 37 (Calderon & Nestande), AB 1805 (Calderon & Nestande), SBX8 42 (Correa & Cogdill), and SB 1010 (Correa & Cogdill) – OPPOSE

Dear Senators Correa and Cogdill and Assembly Members Calderon and Nestande:

The Committee for Green Foothills joins the broad opposition to the four identical bills introduced on February 10, 2010, ABX8 37 (Calderon & Nestande), AB 1805 (Calderon & Nestande), SBX8 42 (Correa & Cogdill), and SB 1010 (Correa & Cogdill). These bills attack a fundamental California environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, and seek to eliminate the central purpose of requiring agencies to "look before they leap" in approving projects and permit, and eliminate legal protection through judicial review of faulty environmental analysis.  The result is to fundamentally undermine the ability of communities to participate in decisions that determine how their neighborhoods will grow and how new developments can be modified to reduce or avoid any significant adverse effects on their health and welfare.

If these bills are passed, the Secretary of the Business, Transportation, and Housing Administration could select 25 projects each year for the next 5 years and grant them immunity from the environmental and public participation requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. The selection would occur before the environmental review has been performed, so it would not be selection based on the quality of each project's environmental review.  The prior selection instead functions as a "blank check" that encourages agencies to downplay environmental risks from projects, because they would know that publishing misleading environmental analyses for projects they favor would in this case, not carry any legal risk.  Further, because there are no objective criteria for the selection of these projects, this is an invitation to the worst kind of political abuse. 

The criteria for project selection make no mention of favoring projects with fewer environmental projects but instead appear to prefer very large projects.  The criteria expressly allow private projects to be exempt, leading to a situation where politically connected, large developer would escape the legal review that pertains to even small project by an average taxpayer that runs a much smaller risk of harming the environment.  Residents in California’s communities, cities, and counties would not be able to enforce the environmental review process of the Environmental Quality Act for any of the 125 projects – no matter their size or impact on their lives. 

These bills would strip the ability of communities to hold developers and project proponents accountable for implementing mitigation measures that reduce or avoid a development project’s significant adverse effects on air and water quality, traffic congestion, noise and open space.

Eliminating the ability to enforce California’s premier public health and environmental law could lead to the siting of new polluting power plants and waste facilities located next to schools and neighborhoods and much more. Other controversial projects such as the peripheral canal; the siting of new energy facilities in spectacular and sensitive areas of the state; new onshore oil facilities and pipelines to support offshore oil development promoted by the Administration; roads through state parks, new residential subdivisions on contaminated soil; and the siting and construction of nuclear power plants, new dams for water storage, new prisons in cities and counties could all get a pass from the necessary scrutiny that ensures the right projects are built in the right location.

For the past four decades, community involvement in the environmental review process has improved proposed projects, reducing a project’s significant adverse impacts to public health and the environment, while improving our quality of life. These bills would allow a select number of projects to avoid public scrutiny.  The inherent ill-advised policy in these bills simply erodes California’s legacy of environmental protection. Therefore, we all strongly oppose these measures.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Brian A. Schmidt

Legislative Advocate, Santa Clara County

Lennie Roberts

Legislative Advocate, San Mateo County

Cynthia D’Agosta, CGF Executive Director

cc:  Santa Clara County and San Mateo County Assembly Members and State Senators

Judicial activism against the environment

A blow is struck by judicial activism on behalf of a misguided minority of landowners in a recent California Supreme Court decision overriding the majority of voters in a Santa Clara County Open Space Authority election (decision here). Worse still, this decision will make future funding of open space purchases by any California government agency more difficult, although not impossible. We at CGF participated in a "Friend of the Court" brief on behalf of the Open Space Authority, and are sorry things didn't go the right way.

The background is that California law since Proposition 13 has allowed a simple majority of voters to decrease tax rates but requires a two-thirds supermajority to increase "special taxes" (taxes not just meant for general public benefit purposes). A "special assessment," however, is different from a "special tax" in that it provides a special benefit to specific properties, and doesn't require a two-thirds vote. The entire legal battle is over what constitutes a "special assessment."

Proposition 218, passed in 1996, tightened the legal requirements for special assessments in ways that remained poorly defined (probably to keep voters from anticipating specific problems and voting against the measure). As the Supreme Court notes, Prop. 218 created a paradox whereby a "special district" must constitute all the parcels that receive a special benefit from the assessment, but it also says that if the benefit reaches every parcel in the district then it isn't a "special benefit" but rather a general benefit that needs a supermajority to pass.

The Supreme Court dealt with this paradox by saying that if parcels receive "direct advantages" from the benefit, like proximity to a park, then it's a special benefit even if conferred on all parcels in the district. So far, so good. But then the Court spends the remainder of the opinion ignoring what it just said. The Open Space Authority had justified the assessment by describing the direct advantages all parcels in the district will receive, such as better views and improved access to public recreation. The Court ignores this and says because these benefits reach everyone, they aren't special benefits and fall under Prop. 218 proscriptions.

So why would the Supreme Court behave so strangely? The likely reason is that Prop. 218 was itself a voter reaction to a previous Supreme Court ruling that allowed expansive uses of special districts. The Court is aware that initiative propositions are the only mechanisms that voters have to overrule it, so the Court felt obligated to overreact to the Open Space Authority's special assessment, something that resembled a standard property assessment.

Short of changing Propositions 218 or 13, this decision is the last word on this issue, and an assessment like the Open Space Authority's will require a two-thirds supermajority. However, somewhat different special assessments may still be possible. An assessment that set up a priority acquisition area and assessed more in the immediate vicinity of that area than far away from there, or assessed more when an acquisition is first made, might still be legal. This is something that will have to be tested in the future.

-Brian