California needs to preserve clean air and public oversight. Why Prop. 45 must be stopped

California voters will decide the fate of a proposal that speeds up approvals for certain projects and changes how the state’s bedrock environmental law can be applied to them. Below, an environmental justice advocate says Proposition 45 empowers bad actors and shifts costs to taxpayers. The opposing view: An affordable housing advocate says historic misuse of environmental laws have delayed projects California can no longer wait for.

No matter what we look like or where we live, Californians want our communities to be healthy and safe from the impacts of toxic industries.

If passed, Proposition 45, which appears on the state’s November ballot, would be disastrous for communities that already live near industrial pollution, where business interests continue to build new facilities and put our health and safety at risk. Prop. 45 weakens environmental reviews, reduces community input on polluting projects, and allows wealthy corporations to shift the costs onto taxpayers and families. 

This fall Californians must vote ‘no’ on it.

Prop. 45 gives polluters much more power over where and how a wide range of projects are developed. Everything, from freeway expansions to mineral extraction facilities near sensitive habitats, could be easier to build. Ecosystem-destroying dams and hazardous biomass power plants could all happen with limited public oversight. Even data centers, while not explicitly mentioned, are legally plausible, as scholars have noted.

Prop. 45 essentially shifts power from the public agencies charged with overseeing these projects to the industrial developers backing them.

Many Californians are familiar with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA (pronounced see-kwah), but not everyone understands how this bedrock environmental law works. CEQA helps protect communities who live closest to polluting projects by requiring that developers take steps to reduce the harms their projects will inflict on air, water and nearby communities. CEQA is frequently the only tool available to limit the worst impacts of pollution, especially when these projects are built near hospitals, parks, schools and homes.

Projects ranging from massive warehouse facilities in Fresno to dairy biogas facilities in Tulare County, for example, offer big profits for corporations, but the hidden costs are what happens to the air, water and health of the communities close to them.

Public review under CEQA offers balance. The CEQA process can and often has led to benefits, like shifted truck routes that reduce the proximity of emissions, or better air filtration to address landfill odors, or investments in technology to reduce polluted run-off water. 

CEQA is community power in action. 

If Prop. 45 passes, it’s not just housing that benefits. It’s a long list of project types that could be built, and with far fewer opportunities for communities and public officials to secure these kinds of protections. Prop. 45 even gives developers a new right to sue agencies that try to impose commonsense limitations.

Without a full environmental review, many communities will face even greater public health risks. By allowing corporations to set the terms through a ballot proposition, cities and counties could be forced to use public dollars to curb the pollution private projects create.

When it’s harder for cities and counties to deny or put conditions on hazardous projects, it’s taxpayers who are forced to live with greater pollution in their backyards.

Californians have fought long and hard for state and federal laws that keep our air breathable and our water drinkable. The Trump administration has shown how quickly those protections can be cast aside. Prop. 45 suppresses California’s strongest defense against recent federal rollbacks, leaving everyone at greater risk of polluted air, polluted water and perilous risks to our health.

Special interests like for-profit utilities, tech companies and developers of luxury homes are spending millions of dollars to pass Prop. 45. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the measure may initially cost the public more than $100 million annually. The long-term impacts could reportedly be “more substantial.”

Prop. 45 benefits the state’s wealthiest and most powerful interests without offering any proof — or requiring any guarantees — that Californians won’t shoulder the costs.

It’s also designed to make it almost impossible for the Legislature to fix any problems the measure causes. Under Prop. 45, legislators can only amend it by a two-thirds vote — and only if an amendment “furthers the purposes” of the measure.

More than 270 environmental justice, housing, health, labor, conservation, civil rights, climate and clean energy groups oppose Prop. 45. To defeat it, voters must stand up to the corporations that want to dismantle California’s bedrock environmental laws and take away community voices — all so they can more easily line their own pockets.

This commentary has been updated to remove a reference to warehouses as type of project that could be eligible under Prop. 45. The ballot text explicitly excludes “heavy industrial” uses on mixed-use developments.