By Becky O’Malley : berkeleydailyplanet – excerpt

Almost all my life I’ve lived in walking distance of a major urban university. For most of the last 60 years or so I’ve been in Berkeley. As a Cal (that’s what we called it in the olden days) undergraduate I started out in a rooming house (aka “ a single family home”, i.e. a house with many more bedrooms than bathrooms or kitchens). It was a classic Berkeley brown shingle, vintage turn of the 20th century, on Channing near Telegraph, owned and inhabited by a classic hard-working immigrant, the proprietor of Anna’s Donut House next door, open as I recall from 6 a.m. until two a.m. Anna didn’t get much sleep…

Why am I telling you all this? Because last week I watched the oral arguments about the appeal by a couple of neighborhood groups of a lower court decision which would have allowed UCB to evade California Environmental Qualiy Act (CEQA) requirements that noise impacts and alternative sites be studied before building an 1100 bed student dorm on a historic site at People’s Park.

That’s studied, not eliminated.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Tom Lippe, in his oral presentation pointed to language in California law that clearly included noise as one of the categories that an environment impact report needs to review. UCB had simply chosen to skip that step when it did the CEQA-mandated Environmental Impact Report. The university’s hired counsel suggested that human social noise, which students could be expected to make, shouldn’t count. The underlying premise of UC’s argument seemed to be that they could do as they please, Berkeley citizenry be damned…

All this adds up to my long-winded response to an op-ed in yesterday’s Chronicle by Professor Elmendorf. It appears to be part of an on-going campaign to get rid of the Environmental Quality Act, orchestrated by what is called, sometimes without sarcasm, the development “community”. These are the folks who believe that there’s big money in big buildings, and that if your profit margin doesn’t perform up to expectations it must be the government’s fault. You can read his Sunday issue treatise here:

California legislators refuse to fix CEQA. Here’s how Newsom and the courts can take charge.  

What was cut from the Chron piece, he says on Twitter, is a lengthy discussion of whether the real effect of CEQA can be reliably measured. The author admits honestly that “ CEQA critics have no way of quantifying the true severity of the CEQA problem. That’s why, in my first draft of the Chronicle piece, I wrote that I am only ‘weakly of the view that CEQA is a big problem.’ “ …(more)

Please read the entire article, as it gives a good explanation on the whys and wherefores of prop and con CEQA attitudes that are hitting the courts now with pleas for protection and destruction of the California Environmental Quality Act that has been in place since Regan was Governor. That leads us to wonder what would Regan say now about this discrepancy over one of his landmark bills.