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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And we have a very special guest with us.

So I've had legislators on the show before. We've had Assemblymember Rogers, Assemblymember Connolly, Congressman Hoffman, all of whom represent the North Coast. Now we are going almost to the opposite end of California, down to San Diego area, to talk with Senator Catherine Blakespear. Welcome to the show.

SEN. CATHERINE BLAKESPEAR:

Well, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

WHEELER:

So introduce yourself because folks up here might not be familiar with your good work and introduce your district as well so we can understand the area in which you represent.

BLAKESPEAR:

Yes, thank you. So my district is Southern California. So I have 60 miles of coastline in San Diego County and then parts of Orange County. So I represent almost a million people and I come from having been, before I was a state senator, I was the mayor of the city of Encinitas, which many people love that city and I love it too. I was in local government for eight years. So six as mayor, two on city council.

I'm now in my fourth year in the state Senate and I chair the environmental quality committee, the EQ committee in the state Senate. So I see a lot of environmental related things that come through my committee and I'm also particularly interested in that topic. So I'm thrilled to be with you today.

WHEELER:

And you have earned yourself a well-deserved reputation as an environmental champion in the legislature. So where does your environmental ethos come from? Why do you care about this? Why is this on your web page when you go to issues I care about, environment is the number one thing, the first thing on your website. So why the environment? Why is that such an animating issue for you as a legislator?

BLAKESPEAR:

I mean, what are the things that speak to people's hearts? It's like the planet, the plants, the beautiful natural resources that we have here in California, and being able to be connected to the earth. I mean, I feel like all those, those have been animating basically my entire life.

So there are things that I get particularly involved in because they seem like such an injustice. Like for example, the enormous amount of plastic pollution that we have, single use plastic. And so I was able to author the plastic bag ban bill where now at your grocery store, you're only offered a paper bag if you didn't bring your own.

And so there are things I care about wildlife, care about ecosystems. I care about fighting climate change, but basically rooted in a desire to protect living creatures and plants and our future on this planet. Climate change can immediately become the data or numbers discussion. And I'm always taking it back to what are we gonna be able to have living in our oceans or us on this planet? So I just, I feel like it's a particularly important to my heart and that's why I work on it.

WHEELER:

So I wanted to dig in, in particular to your work around CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. So maybe we can just begin by describing what is CEQA and its role in California protecting its natural environment. So do you want to take a stab at CEQA 101 primer? Sure.

BLAKESPEAR:

Yeah, I mean, so in California, when we have a project that is going to damage the environment in some way, we have a process, which is called CEQA, for disclosing that to the public and mitigating it to the extent possible. So it is our landmark environmental law, and it's been around for decades.

And it's something that gets a lot of blame right now for stopping progress. So you may have heard of this abundance movement or abundance agenda. And I've read the book called Abundance, and it is very good. And it does put a finger on things that are stopping us from delivering like clean energy or more housing or an effective transportation network, things that we know that we want for people's prosperity. But we also need to have a process of protecting the environment.

And CEQA right now, because it is such a scapegoat for all of the delays, is there are a lot of carve outs or exemptions or loopholes. And right now on the ballot, even there's something that would create an enormous additional exclusion from CEQA for everything that would be considered an essential project. So I think that's very much an overreach.

But I'll also just say that I recognize that CEQA has been hijacked in circumstances to accomplish things that are not environmental goals. They have to do with labor standards on projects or just NIMBY delays on things that you can extend the cost and price of something or the cost and timeline of something, then it can become infeasible to do. So people who want to stop a housing development or that kind of thing.

But the reality is CEQA is unique because it's the only part of our process when we're building things that requires mitigation. So like, for example, if there's a project that proposes to build out into the Joshua Tree habitat, then the developer would have to put money into a mitigation bank or buy property themselves to preserve Joshua Tree somewhere else. So if you don't have CEQA, you don't have a mitigation process. And some of the mitigation, too, has to do with things like if water is polluted, the water has to be cleaned by the polluting industry.

So I am opposed to how broadly we're thinking about CEQA exemptions. I wish we were able to have a conversation that narrowed CEQA to accomplish its environmental goals, but also kept it in place.

And I also just want to say that a lot of times delays to projects, it's multifactorial. So it's not just CEQA. It's one of the biggest things is utility relocations. You know, you'll have a project that will take years and years to get approval from the utility companies or right-of-way acquisition. We see this with high-speed rail. Some of the major delays are around right-of-way. And they already actually have a lot of right-of-way where high-speed rail is being built and it's not being built through our urbanized areas.

So it is something when you look at, there are also local government delays. One of the biggest determinants of whether a housing project gets off the ground is whether the city leadership actually wants it. So there are ways to slow down through process. And it's not just CEQA. It's all over the place. But CEQA does seem to get the blame for it.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so as you say, CEQA's gotten a bad rap in recent years and folks like Ezra Klein and others have identified in part correctly the ways in which CEQA has been a burden and have also, I think, and this is just me editorializing, have overstated the effect of CEQA on California's housing crisis. As you say, there are multiple other issues that impact delivering housing in the state of California.

BLAKESPEAR:

But I also just want to add that almost all infill housing already has a CEQA exemption through all the state laws that have passed in Sacramento in the last, less than a decade. So the idea that housing, if we have a CEQA exemption for housing, which is somehow gonna, what that will allow is only more development in high fire severity zones. So it basically is sprawl.

So we're saying, do we want to allow a fast track for sprawl and the current CEQA system, part of it to have the exemption for infill is that it incentivizes doing infill because you can either go up or you can go out, right, with housing. So it's like, we do have a lot of suburban and urban areas that can accommodate more housing. We don't have to be sprawling into the back country and eating up habitat and our natural spaces, but that's really what is at stake here.

WHEELER:

Sure, so as you said, the legislature has been responsive to issues with CEQA. So we've had almost innumerable CEQA reform bills in the last 10 years that have provided various carve-outs and exemptions for certain kinds of projects primarily focused on housing, trying to have transit-oriented housing development, so allowing for taller, denser buildings near high-frequency transit routes. As you also mentioned, other infill housing exemptions so that CEQA largely doesn't apply for the kinds of housing that we want to see built, which is an already disturbed land within existing communities that are going to be well-served by services.

And yet, despite all of this, there's still this call, or still a belief, or housing still being utilized by antagonists of CEQA to argue for its reform.

So maybe we can start on Prop 45, which is being sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce. It is a massive effort to fundamentally reshape CEQA to make it perhaps less effective. I know that you've come out in opposition to Proposition 45. So do you want to tell us about what Proposition 45 is and how you conceive of Proposition 45 and the role of the legislature in determining what CEQA reforms should move forward?

BLAKESPEAR:

Yeah, I mean, I think the idea that we're trying to kill a mosquito with a sledgehammer is the right way to think about it. This is just so broad, and it is, like I said, this CEQA exemption will allow for sprawl housing in high fire severity zones to have a CEQA exemption. And that's exactly the kind of project that we want to go through CEQA. And that also means that there will no longer be the incentive for the infill type of housing.

And it's, unfortunately, what we see from the federal government are really substantial rollbacks of our environmental laws, our environmental analysis, protection of our national parks and offshore oil drilling. I mean, pulling money or creating the environment where money is pulled from offshore wind and the next generation of energy projects. What's happening from the federal government is substantial. And California needs to be a bulwark against that backsliding. And so this is not the time for us to be gutting our environmental laws.

I think the idea that things can get built faster is something we need to take seriously. And people at all levels of government, whether it's the city, or it's the airborne, or it's the water district, or it's the county, the state, all of these players are involved in projects and particularly big projects. So we all need to take seriously, particularly at a staff level, that we need to do things faster. We need to get the permits done. And we have had laws around that. But the idea that you would just be completely exempted from our environmental laws, that's something that happened that was basically leveraged through the state budget last year. And I tried to do a cleanup bill on that this year, and it didn't make it.

So let me say one more thing on Prop 45. There's a dispute here, but it's definitely arguably likely that it will lead to data centers having a faster track to be built in California too. And that, I think, is a particular concern to people because we want to have a full analysis of data centers. Data centers, of course, use a lot of energy, a lot of water, and they could potentially be in a lot of locations. And there's a huge push on having that. So the state's top land use attorneys point out that there are exemptions specifically that say that this does not apply to, Prop 45 does not apply to certain things, but it does not say that about data centers. And they think that data centers are implicated by it. So I am very concerned about that part as well.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, so if you want more information on Prop 45, we have a whole show in our archives with Elizabeth Reed Wainscott of the Center for Biological Diversity. So be sure to check that out. You can find that on the lostcoastoutpost.com.

All right. So, Senator, you mentioned last year's big CEQA reform bill, SB 131, and the governor's strong arming of the legislature to get it passed. Let's go back in time a year and remember what happened in that legislation and discuss the good and bad of SB 131. So, woo, going back in a time machine. Tell us you were in the legislature. What happened to the legislature in this budget process?

BLAKESPEAR:

Yeah, so the governor basically leveraged the entire budget, him signing the budget over the legislature passing this big CEQA exemption. And I didn't vote for it and I spoke against it, but I do understand the instinct and also his messaging, which a lot of people agreed with afterward, which is we're cutting green tape, we're making it easier to build in California, we're maintaining our status as the fourth largest economy in a state that can do things. We're not mired in getting in our own way, we are moving full steam ahead into the future. And I get that and I think it's important, that's an important ethic and value that we have in California and is true.

But the reality of this is that it was done so last minute and it was so, in some ways, the parts of it that are half-baked where the details aren't quite worked out and that was particularly true around this advanced manufacturing exemption. Because there was an exemption, a broad exemption for advanced manufacturing, which was not defined in a way that was just looking at clean energy or the types of things that we might want advanced manufacturing. And it includes things like strip mining. The only data point we have to know, like what is the definition, is those projects that have received a certain tax break. So they, under advanced manufacturing, were able to get a tax break. And so when you look through that list, it's really alarming and you see advanced recycling, which is also, and oil refining and a whole bunch of things that we don't really want to have a CEQA exemption.

So I did introduce a bill and got it all the way through the legislature, which was a lot of work, actually, because there were a lot of different players involved with this and supporters and opponents. And it was opposed, well, anyway, it made it through the legislature and then the governor vetoed it. So that was my one veto this year. In some ways that wasn't surprising because he was so proud of having passed the law last year. And I think the veto message said, we need to wait to see what happens with this. And my feeling is, do we need to wait to have a problem, like an explosion in a facility that's placed too close to homes and hurts or damages people or the environment? That's not the kind of thing that we want.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. And we're talking with Senator Catherine Blakespear about her environmental legislation here in Sacramento.

Yeah, so going back in time, one of the things I remember about SB 131, the big bill that the governor used the budget process to force through, was one that the nature of kind of the closed door negotiations on what was going to be included, where environmental advocates were all speculating because it was a very tight group of leadership in the legislature and the governor's office who were writing the bill. And then the very narrow amount of time that the legislature had to consider the bill. If I remember correctly, I think the ledge language was introduced on a Friday and it was voted on on a Monday afternoon, which I think provided the minimum number of hours necessary under the law for the legislature to be able to consider the bill.

And as you say, there were terms in there like advanced manufacturing, which were left largely undefined or were subject to a lot of disagreement about what they could mean.

And at the time of the signing, there was an expectation and promise from folks in the legislature like Senator McGuire that there would be a follow-up cleanup bill and that we would reign this in and we had to get something passed quickly, but we will have more time to have more considered thought. And that's what your bill this year, SB 954, attempted to do. So 954, what was in this legislation that would have fixed the loopholes that existed in SB 131?

BLAKESPEAR:

So, you know, we worked with a broad coalition of environmentalists and also labor to have something that would establish standards.

So basically what happened, the way I think of this, is the aperture was opened this far. It was like, okay, now these things can go through a CEQA exemption, so they don't have to go through CEQA. So what we were doing here is we were closing it back to about here, but saying, if you still have the CEQA exemption over here in your advanced manufacturing, you have to follow certain standards. So you have to have, the project has to be cleaner than a certain standard in terms of air pollution. It has to have certain labor standards.

It has to basically, part of it was to go through a certification from the governor's office to certify that this is some, one of the projects that we want to incentivize, because you don't really know what the future holds in terms of what kind, especially around technology and data center type things or quantum or these kinds of things. Like what are we going to see in California? We want to make sure that we see it as building the future of California, because the point is to incentivize what we want in the state.

But all, a lot of these pieces, of course, have opposition from various industries or various other folks. And we were not, you know, we just weren't able to get something that the governor supported. The only response that we have from the governor's office was that this was more than cleanup when they were, when this was like a staff level, staff to staff level, where they were talking about the specifics. But there was no guidance on it.

And in some ways, if it's open this far, and then it's like, cleanup means it goes like that. Like, that's, you're kind of not feeling like you're doing anything, right? It's like, we did want to say that for those projects that get the exemption, they still meet certain standards. And then for other projects, like if they're doing strip mining, that they don't get an exemption.

So anyway, it was, it's too bad. And I don't, I, the substance of it is what matters to me. So I don't feel good about saying, well, we did our part, we passed the bill. No, like, I feel like in communities, there will be projects that are built that are inherently polluting, that will be built too close to other types of land use. And we are not, we are not creating the mitigation or the setbacks from communities or that protect local communities and these kinds of things. And I think that's not the right call. Like, we really should be, we should be more thoughtful about that.

WHEELER:

So this is something that the governor is proud of. As you said, he was proud of SB 131 and in vetoing 954, your bill from this session said that he liked the advanced manufacturing exemption, that that was kind of the whole part of doing SB 131.

I also was frustrated with the governor's veto this year on a number of bills, some tribal water rights bills and a bill that EPIC sponsored AB 2494, that thank you for voting in favor of AB 2494.

And I'm trying to assess this governor as he is about to leave office. I think it's apparent that he has higher political ambitions than just the governor of California and might be weighing some larger office. What do you think is going to be the legacy? Having served in the legislature for part of his governorship, how should environmental voters remember this governor?

BLAKESPEAR:

I actually feel like Gavin Newsom is an environmentalist. I think when you look at some of these really big projects, like opening the Klamath River and having salmon reappear there in this ancestral home of our tribes and the efforts that it took to get that done. It's like, or we're about to open the country's largest wildlife crossing, the Annenberg in Los Angeles, where it connects like two habitats across this massive LA freeway. And there are many examples.

I don't have everyone at the top of my head, but I feel like he does love to be outside and do the fly fishing and be with, heard him talk about being with his dad. And I feel like for people who wanna protect the natural environment, it usually does come back to something that's deep within them where they just deeply care about it. And I do feel like the governor has that.

I think he also has all sorts of other influences and priorities. And so one of the other things environmentally that I mentioned at the beginning is the plastic packaging efforts, SB 54 is the bill, but that, and that was from Senator Ben Allen, but I expect to take on this. And this is a current active fight with the plastics industry and manufacturers and retailers who sell plastics. And the question of, are we gonna be able to, in California to make the changes so that when you walk into the supermarket, everything you see is not a single use plastic item. And so, but the governor backslid on that a little bit because he was influenced by industry saying this is completely impractical and it will cause our prices to go up. So I feel like there are a lot of different cross currents that affect his decision-making.

And I, some people are, who are environmentalists are broadly critical of him. I would say, I don't share that because I do feel like he's done a lot of things. And even one of the things I had this year was a wildlife coexistence bill that was reestablishing a program that we had at the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And we were asking for something like $40 million. It ended up being funded with 5 million, but it could very easily have been funded with nothing.

And the governor invited me to the, a bill signing for that bill and some other bills, the 30 by 30 conference in San Francisco that was just last week. And I, you know, I'm around all these people who are committed to the 30 by 30 efforts and just the energy around that and the commitment and the Secretary Wade Crowfoot's involvement with it. It's just like California remains an environmentally committed state. And we are trying to do all the things with creating the clean energy future and preserving habitat. And 30 by 30 on its own is a major commitment and aspiration that we're chipping away at getting to.

So yeah, I don't, I'm not as critical as some, and I do, I think he would be, if he is able to be successful at a higher level, I think that we would be happy with that. I don't feel like he's gonna sell the environment out.

WHEELER:

Okay, so the legislature has a lot of things that it wants to do and fund. Wildlife coexistence, for example. We are running into budget realities. How are you conceiving of how we should prioritize things like 30 by 30, the environment, in this age of, not quite austerity, but the budget's tighter than certainly we'd want it to be. Right.

BLAKESPEAR:

You know, every single thing we talk about in Sacramento is there's not enough money for it. It's Medi-Cal, it's, I was just reading an article about people who are on assisted living who are going to be thrown off their plan and what are they going to do? I mean, there are just endless, we don't have enough money for transit, which is another big environmental commitment, which I work on and care about, but it's very hard to make progress in that space. Where is the money for transit and our mode shift and the idea that everybody shouldn't be driving in a single occupancy vehicle, even if it's autonomous, for congestion reasons, but also climate reasons, of course.

So I don't know. You just have to fight for everything. You have to fight for it to be a priority.

And some of the, there was in my first couple of, first or second year, there was a proposal to sweep $30 million out of the Habitat Conservation Fund. And it was something the voters approved in 1990. And, but I don't know if there had been a recent champion in the legislature saying this is really important because it allows us to buy land and to also maintain and rehabilitate land. So I'm advocating for it at budget sub two, which I'm on. And then it basically, in the next version of the budget, it was no longer swept.

And I felt really gratified and successful because in a way it's just giving voice to the value. It's saying this matters. I, what are we doing here? This isn't, and how are we going to get to 30 by 30 if we don't have money to buy land to preserve it? So I, anyway, I think we'll just have to continue to fight.

WHEELER:

Okay, so we are in the nice quiet part of the year for legislators where you get to go back to your districts and hear from folks and start to think about the next legislative session. What's on your mind for 2027? What do you hope to accomplish? What are you hearing from your constituents as priorities for them in the next session?

BLAKESPEAR:

Well, a couple things are already cooking. So one of them is just trying to think ahead about this SB 54 plastic packaging situation. We don't want to have so many, we don't want to have a lot of exemptions and that basically make it so that status quo maintains and we don't see the change that we need to see. So I'm, that's something that's of importance.

I am also in the wildlife coexistence space in my district. There's a really hot issue around a particular beach in La Jolla where sea lions come up onto the beach and people share the beach part of the year. And there was an incident where a seal was kicked by a man and I know, and he was charged thankfully. But it's like, so wildlife coexistence is really acute in my district is something that I feel like I'll likely be working on and trying to accomplish the 30 by 30 goals and be involved in that. That's something that's, that's of high priority to me as well.

And so this idea of natural and working lands and how are that, how is that incentivized with like our cap and invest program and tying together cap and invest and what we're trying to do across a range of different topics and knitting them all together. That's something that I also think about. Okay.

WHEELER:

So we have elections soon, unless something totally weird happens. Javier Becerra is likely to be our next governor. Do you have any thoughts for the incoming governor, assuming that, of course, he's listening to the Econews Report, about what he should do, how he should set up his administration and execute in this first year?

BLAKESPEAR:

Yeah, who he appoints to be the Natural Resources Secretary and these key positions, I think will really matter. He came into our caucus and basically spoke about his environmental commitments and as the Attorney General, the various lawsuits that he'd brought against oil companies and things. And I thought, I was impressed by that.

I felt like he a little bit got a bad rap in the election because he was running against Tom Steyer who really owned the environmental lane because of all of the many decades of work he's done in that area. And also because of affordability as a campaign talking point has swamped like all other issues, almost everything is framed in affordability terms.

And so I'm hopeful and believe that he will be an environmental champion. And we need to, like on all issues, those who care about it need to provide a roadmap. Like this is what we wanna see. This is what we care about. These are priorities for us so that it's easier for administration to accomplish that.

And the legislature, it's such a messy process which is part of its magic that there are so many, there's this competition for ideas and priorities and leadership and all these things. And so, but we do do big things in California. We know we pass laws and we accomplish things. And I think that we'll continue to do that for the next four years.

WHEELER:

Okay, Senator, unfortunately, we are out of time, but I am so glad that you joined the Econews today. I've learned so much about your thoughts about CEQA and the legislature. I'm fascinated to see what this next session holds, and good luck to you going into it.

BLAKESPEAR:

Yes, well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a great pleasure to chat with you. Okay.

WHEELER:

Well, join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.