Two months ago, California passed what many described as the “Holy Grail” of housing reform: a law that exempts most urban infill projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which interest groups often cynically leverage to delay or deny developments for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment.
Now, one of the state’s most powerful Democratic lawmakers is seeking to reverse that — seemingly for the lone purpose of undermining a single controversial project in her district. And her aggressive new strategy could define the next chapter of the NIMBY playbook in California.
Here’s what’s going on:
This week was a frenzied one in Sacramento, as lawmakers raced to publish reams of lengthy and complex bills, hammer out deals and take final votes before the legislative session ends Saturday. On Monday night, the text of Senate Bill 158 dropped, and Jordan Grimes, a state and regional resilience manager at the nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance, began combing through it.
Grimes was hoping to find language he and other advocates had been pushing for to clarify environmental habitat protections in the CEQA reforms lawmakers had passed a few months ago.
Instead, he discovered something strange: a highly specific provision that applied CEQA to projects located in cities with more than 85,000 and fewer than 95,000 people and in counties of more than 440,000 but fewer than 455,000 people — as long as a piece of the project parcel was located on wetland and a regulatory floodway and was adjacent to a California historical landmark.
As far as Grimes could tell using 2020 Census data, the only place in California that met these criteria was Santa Barbara — an area represented by Democratic state Sen. Monique Limón, the incoming leader of the state Senate. Although Limón was originally set to take over in early 2026 from current leader Mike McGuire, the Senate abruptly voted Thursday to move the transition date to Nov. 17.