Environmental laws are not your enemy

Remember the Cayucos Viewshed?

You don’t have to remember it because it’s still there—all 47,000 acres of green rolling hills, oak woodlands, creeks, hiking trails, and occasional farms between highways 41 and 46, with Morro Bay and Cambria at one end and Paso Robles and Atascadero at the other. It is one of SLO County’s signature landscapes.

It’s still there because, in 2008, after the county Board of Supervisors made a sweetheart deal that handed over the Cayucos Viewshed to politically connected developers so they could fill it up with McMansions, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) stopped them.

Specifically, the Sierra Club filed a CEQA lawsuit, which forced the county to repeal that sweetheart deal and agree to create a countywide viewshed and hillside protection ordinance.

Don’t let corporate polluters convince you CEQA is a bad word. CEQA is here to help protect your rights. The state law requires evaluating, disclosing, and preventing or mitigating significant environmental and public health impacts of certain proposed development projects. It also helps make sure companies and governments are aware of potential hurdles prior to construction. It requires public and governmental notification of these projects and consideration of public input. CEQA is an essential governmental transparency law, one of the few laws that ensures the public is notified and has a say in corporate and governmental actions. 

You would think the Trump administration’s attacks on our public lands, forests, and our coast would prompt California lawmakers to double down on protecting California’s communities and ecosystems, but we’re seeing the opposite. California legislators across the political spectrum are teaming up with corporate interests to assault the state’s environmental protection laws.

For decades, California lawmakers, big business, and the chamber of commerce have repeatedly pushed to roll back state environmental laws, and sometimes succeeded. In 2025, the state Legislature successfully passed laws to weaken the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), but they had to be sneaky about it. At the last minute, they shoved the unpopular legislation into the state budget bill, a practice favored by legislators who know their bill is unlikely to pass on its own. The new law could have been fixed, but this September, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the cleanup bill that would have fixed the major issues in the 2025 law.

Corporations and the lawmakers they bankroll are hoping you won’t notice what’s underneath their attacks on CEQA. They justify their attacks with claims of “reform,” “cleaning up red tape,” “speeding up affordable housing,” and “streamlining the permitting of clean energy projects.”

     Don’t be fooled. The attempt to pit environmental laws against affordable housing and clean energy is disingenuous and categorically false. Affordable housing already has many CEQA exemptions, and renewable energy projects have been eligible for expedited environmental review since 2022. 

The true intention of CEQA streamliners becomes clear when you notice they’re pushing for corporate loopholes to fast-track data centers, pipelines, heavy industry, etc., with minimal public review. All while undermining your right to be fully informed. 

Undermining environmental laws allows corporations and the government to make decisions impacting our neighborhoods, health, land, air, and water, with limited public input. Local communities lose when the state erodes CEQA. 

Recent polling, as reported by Capitol Weekly, found that “CEQA approval runs to 90 percent among Democrats, 73 percent among independents, and even a plurality (41 percent) among Republicans.”

That’s why the relentless “reformers” of CEQA have to frame their attack as a few adjustments in the name of affordability, prosperity, and progress. Five decades ago, their predecessors used the same playbook to fight the passage of the federal Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that environmental protections would impose a crushing financial burden on industry and destroy the economy. 

They were lying then, and they’re lying now. They’re trying to trick you into thinking that environmental destruction in the name of private profit is a public benefit. We should not let corporations burden local communities with the long-term public and environmental health costs of pollution and poor planning. We should not let our government reduce governmental transparency and the public’s right to participate. It’s time to remember that environmental laws are not the problem—they are your protection. ∆

Gianna Patchen is chapter organizer for the Santa Lucia Chapter of the Sierra Club. Andrew Christie served as chapter director from 2004 to 2023. Send a letter for publication to letters@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Oct 8-15, 2026.