Environmental Litigation in the News: California Environmental Law Has Unintended Consequences

Interesting article in the L.A. Times on how businesses, especially real estate development businesses, are using an environmental protection law, the California Environmental Quality Act, to battle the competition. 

The law was originally intended as a state version of NEPA:

CEQA dates from 1970, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a law creating a process of public review and environmental mitigation for all state-funded projects. The law's application was significantly broadened after activists sued under CEQA to block a privately funded condominium project in the Sierra. The California Supreme Court's ruling in 1972 that CEQA applied to private projects that required action by a public body — like a zoning change or a variance — was later codified by the Legislature.

 But it's allegedly been used by some creative litigators as a weapon against business competitors:

To halt a competing project near USC, Conquest Student Housing turned to a legal weapon that one of its co-owners allegedly compared to a crude bomb: cheap and destructive.Conquest owned 17 buildings that rented to USC students. When the developer Urban Partners proposed erecting a new complex to house 1,600 students, Conquest sued under California's landmark environmental law.

It then filed similar challenges to unrelated Urban Partners projects elsewhere in the state. Conquest withdrew its challenges only after Urban Partners filed a federal racketeering lawsuit.

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In papers filed with the racketeering lawsuit, Urban Partners alleged that a Conquest official warned another competitor that "we should think of him and Conquest like 'Al Qaeda,' adding that it does not cost a lot to build a 'bomb' and cause extensive damage to a development project, and that it only takes a single person to cause serious harm to real estate projects using CEQA."

Conquest officials did not return a call for comment or respond to multiple emails. Jack Rubens, the Los Angeles attorney who handled only the initial complaint against the Gateway project for Conquest, said: "We had very solid grounds for filing that lawsuit."

 I obviously have no way of knowing whether the allegations against this one company are true.  But the article contends that it's become something of a strategy for businesses, and others groups such as unions, to use this environmental statute as a weapon against projects that the business or union opposes for some non-environmental reason.  So much so that there is an effort to change the law.  Read the whole thing, it's quite interesting.