California Budget Deal May be Near: CEQA Changes Demanded by Republican Senators May Be in the Offing

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

Listening carefully to what Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez and Assembly Republican Minority Leader Villines have said and reading between the lines, it appears that a budget deal may be hashed out today that will not make major changes to the version passed out by the Assembly a month ago. But making any definitive statements about what exactly is being proposed and how it will fare in both houses is fraught with difficulties.

Villines was first to speak to reporters gathered in a crush of bodies, microphones, and cameras at the back of the Assembly chambers that resembled a mosh pit at a rock concert. He said that he had worked all weekend and that “all” had agreed that some fix needed to be made with respect to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the state’s basic environmental law, which he called an “AB 32 fix”. When questioned as to who all of them meant, he indicated this was the majority and minority leaders of both the Senate and the Assembly, commonly referred to as the “big four,” but then quickly qualified his statement that there was no specific agreement and that this was just a statement of broadly held views.

Next to walk by the press gathering was Assembly Speaker Nunez enroute to one of the back rooms to brief the Assembly Democratic caucus on developments on the budget. He described the proposals as making only minor changes to the budget and questioned why, if this was the case, the Senate Republicans had not passed the budget a month ago. He described the money changes in the budget as “budget dust.”

I specifically asked Nunez about changes to AB 32 and CEQA and he said flat out that there would be no AB 32 changes and none were proposed in the outline he had seen. The changes that have been bandied about by the Republicans all along are not squarely within the language of AB 32 but have been to CEQA. The Speaker did indicate that he was about to brief his caucus and that any changes to environmental laws would not be made without checking with the environmental community. He was reluctant to discuss what had been agreed to privately.