Features

Brown Flip-flops on CEQA; Governor, Perata Spar

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday November 16, 2007

California Attorney General Jerry Brown told a gathering of California county leaders in Oakland this week that global warming was the single most important issue of our time, that the California Environmental Quality Act was a “key environmental milestone” in fighting the greenhouse gas emissions that are much of the cause of global warming, and that counties which do not address such emissions in their CEQA environmental impact reports face a likelihood of being sued by his office. 

The attorney general, who has become an environmental crusader since returning to statewide office last year, then jokingly admitted, “When I was mayor of Oakland, I tried to abolish CEQA. I didn’t want to have to fill out all those reports. But that was then. This is now.” 

Several in the crowd of county representatives gathered at the Oakland Marriott Convention Center on Tuesday afternoon briefly laughed with Brown and then stopped, and it was not certain if they thought they were joining him in laughing at himself, at Oakland, or at themselves. 

Brown was one of several major speakers at a luncheon gathering at the Marriott, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Senate President Don Perata, and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. County representatives were in Oakland and Alameda County this week for the annual meeting of the California State Association of Counties. 

The attorney general sued San Bernadino County last April over allegations that the county’s newly-written General Plan EIR failed to analyze the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment or propose mitigations for such effect. The attorney general’s office and San Bernadino County later settled. 

That contrasted sharply with Brown’s stance six years ago, when he was mayor of Oakland and rushing to fulfill a campaign pledge to building housing for 10,000 new residents in the downtown area. At Brown’s request, Oakland’s then-Assemblymember Wilma Chan authored state legislation (AB436) that placed a four-year exemption on CEQA-mandated EIR’s in certain large, downtown Oakland residential development projects. At the time, Brown joked  

to columnist Chip Johnson  

that environmental protections weren’t needed in downtown Oakland because "I haven't seen any spotted owls or snail darters in downtown Oakland." 

On Tuesday, the attorney general expanded on his reasoning that environmental protections were not needed for urban areas, saying that “in the city, we don’t worry about things like congestion. We want noise and traffic congestion. That’s part of the urban experience. It’s not like in places like Shasta County, where you want to keep it more pristine.” 

Brown’s remarks at the CSAC luncheon were sandwiched in the middle of some sparring-at-a-distance between two of the state’s political heavyweights, Governor Schwarz-enegger and State President Perata. 

On Tuesday morning, in an article “Perata Criticizes Governor On Spill; State Senator Accuses Schwarzenegger Of Hamstringing Oil Spill Cleanup Efforts,” the Oakland Tribune reported that Perata “blamed Schwarzenegger for leaving key agencies understaffed, rendering the state’s ability to respond to last week’s massive oil spill, in Perata’s view, almost nil.” 

The paper also reported that Perata planned to reintroduce legislation, vetoed by Schwarzenegger this year, to strengthen regional water boards, adding that “Perata said the legislation would improve the state’s ability to prevent oil spills and punish those responsible.” 

In his remarks to the county representatives, Schwarzenegger made no mention of the Tribune article, instead referring to Perata with veiled praise.  

“I’ve been meeting constantly with Senator Perata over the past year,” the governor said. “In fact, I’ve been seeing him more than I have been seeing my wife. I do want to say, though, that Senator Perata is not as good looking as my wife.” 

In his later remarks, Perata responded in kind, praising Schwarzenegger for his “energy and enthusiasm” in attacking California’s problems, and then adding that “the governor is so enthusiastic, if he was a horse, we’d need to give him a urine test to see if he’s on something.” 

For his part, Schwarzenegger said that he and key state legislators are close to an agreement on the language of a bond measure to improve the state’s water infrastructure, and is hoping to seal a deal that can put a bipartisan $10 billion water measure on the February Presidential ballot. 

“We all agree that we need conservation and flood control, but the trick is to find that sweet spot in the negotiations” between one and the other, the governor said. Schwarzenegger added that he is not interested in a water bond that improves the state’s infrastructure in what he called “incremental stages. We should do it all now. If we do it in incremental stages, it will still take twenty years for the projects to be completed, and then it will be too late to go back to the voters to ask for more money to complete the restructuring.” 

Schwarzenegger was the first speaker at the luncheon, and left immediately after speaking, a fact Perata later alluded to. 

“Schwarzenegger said he wanted to talk about water, and then he left,” Perata said. “That’s not uncommon.” Calling the shoring up of the state’s water infrastructure “probably the hardest area to tackle, that’s why we saved it for last,” Perata made no response to the governor’s assertions that a deal was close on a water bond measure, instead choosing to criticize Schwarzenegger for not spending fast enough that infrastructure bond money already authorized. 

Noting that California voters authorized billions of dollars in infrastructure bond measures last November, Perata said that he was “a little bit put off that we have only allocated $78 million dollars of the bond money so far. We aren’t spending enough of it. If you give us the authority to spend money and we don’t spend it, people get cranky.” Perata said that “when we come back to the voters and ask for more money for more projects, they will ask us, ‘What happened to the money we authorized for the last projects?’”