UC, Berkeley’s plans for housing and amenities at People’s Park has run afoul of a core environmental law, but Carol Denney says the fault lies with UC, not the law.
The uproar over the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, is like the 1930's hysteria over marijuana. Politicians weep over CEQA's burden on downtrodden developers, ready to weaken it with exemptions. But the UC regents didn't lose their latest People's Park's case because of CEQA. They just didn't do the homework.
Their brief passed through a lower court, where UC's influence is considerable. But the First Appellate District Court of Appeal's ruling stated, "In each area where the Environmental Impact Report is deficient it skipped a legal requirement, or the record did not support the its conclusions, or both."
Two decades of CEQA decisions analyzed by the Rose Foundation show that its requirements haven't burdened developers or development, but improve proposals which threaten the environment, especially in communities of color. In People's Park's case, it required discussing alternative locations which the UC regents, California's largest landowners, simply chose not to do.
Without CEQA, the question, "can project goals be accomplished without destroying a park on the National Register of Historic Places?" might never have been asked. The regents have a choice: to spend scarce educational resources fighting to destroy an historic park or build the housing we all agree we need on the over 100 acres on or closer to the main campus than People's Park.