California Environmental Quality Act

Modeled after the federal reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act (an extension of the reviews required under the National Historic Preservation Act) for _federal undertakings_, California passed the California Environmental Quality Act.

The California-mandated review is much tougher than the federal reviews. The Transbay blog writes about Gov. Schwarznegger's efforts to puncture CEQA, in response to business interests and "the need to have shovel-ready projects for the economic stimulus package" in "CEQA Terminator." He writes about CEQA:

CEQA requires state and local agencies in California to undergo thorough review of the environmental impacts their projects will cause, and to analyze alternatives to those projects....

Both CEQA and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — the federal environmental legislation on which CEQA is modeled — require agencies to consider a reasonable range of alternatives to a proposed project and the impacts associated with each alternative, including a “No Build” alternative that analyzes the no-project status quo. But CEQA, unlike NEPA, contains a “substantive mandate,” which basically means that state and local agencies in California are held to a higher standard than federal agencies. Once a federal agency has considered the environmental impacts of a proposed project and some identified alternatives to that project, under NEPA, that agency is free to select a project that is harmful to the environment, so long as the agency has complied with procedural requirements. By contrast, CEQA obligates agencies in California not only to study reasonable alternatives, but also to choose feasible project alternatives that are environmentally superior to the proposed project.
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CEQA is superior to NEPA and NHPA reviews, and should be the model that states and cities (DC has a version of NHPA requirements for city undertakings) use when creating their own legislation and subsequent procedures.