Whose Environment, Whose Protection, Whose Law? Gutting CEQA for a Football Stadium

The
lead player in the environmental movement’s battle with AEG over exempting the
proposed downtown football stadium from California environmental laws has
resorted to the tried and true trick of every cynical politician: He has
declared victory in the face of defeat.

Posting
on his National Resources Defense Council’s blog two months ago, David Pettit was
uncompromising: “One thing I do know is that there is no reason to give AEG a
free pass out of our judicial system for this project, as some have
suggested.  We don’t have a separate legal system for the super-rich…Successful
mega-projects have been and are being built in California without any exemption
from our environmental laws.”

On
Friday, he was singing a different tune on why his group and the green-washers
at the California League of Conservation Voters flip-flopped from being “harshly”
critical to being believers that “this is a good project in a perfect a
location in LA.”

“The biggest
environmental problem I see with the stadium is traffic
congestion and an attendant increase in air pollution,” he wrote. “The original
bill contained a vague and unenforceable requirement for AEG to implement ‘best
in nation’ mode shift provisions to incentivize stadium attendees not to use
private cars for travel to and from events; even that requirement went away
after 10 years.  The final bill put teeth into the mode shift requirement,
made it permanent, and authorized the City of Los Angeles to enforce it so long
as the stadium exists.”

Setting aside the fact the city rarely enforces mitigation
requirements, especially for AEG projects, what “best in nation” came to mean
in the bill that passed overwhelmingly in both houses in the legislative
session’s dying moments is that AEG has submit a report asserting it has
achieved “a
trip ratio at the stadium that is not more than 90 percent of the trip ratio at
any other stadium serving a National Football League team “

If
this was baseball with stadiums half the size of those for football so they
often are built in dense urban settings like Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium
where fans do come by public transit, that might mean something. But the New
York NFL teams like the Dallas Cowboys and others built their stadiums outside
of town where there’s lot of parking and room for tailgating.

Then, there’s the “carbon neutrality” provision which “would
have allowed AEG to buy its way out through purchasing non- local carbon
offsets,” Pettit said. “This was changed so that AEG has to pursue local
(job-creating) offsets first, and only then can purchase offsets within the
South Coast Air Basin.”

What he doesn’t mention is that the bill’s provisions don’t
mean a whole lot since it offers a clear loophole by qualifying all
requirements with the phrase “to the extent feasible” – something that AEG will
determine itself.

Also overlooked in the cheerleading was the fact that the
measure AB 292 not only fast-tracks legal challenges to AEG’s environmental
impact report, it bars the courts from any action that would delay “the

construction or operation of the project unless the court finds either
of the following:  (i) The continued construction
or operation of the project presents an imminent threat to the public health
and safety.  (ii) The project site
contains unforeseen important Native American artifacts or unforeseen important
historical, archaeological,  or  ecological values that would be materially,
permanently, and adversely affected by the continued construction or operation
of the project.”

Since the stadium if unlikely to pose such a dire threat to public
safety, we can hope that evidence of Indian artifacts will be found and the
Lost Tribe of Los Angeles would be granted these 14 acres of public land to
build a casino that would make a lot more sense for everyone.

Pettit
takes pride in the fact that the legislation — which has escalated the jobs
numbers to “12,000 full-time jobs during construction and 11,000 permanent jobs
” – requires a project labor agreement which for all intents and purposes means
union-only workers, thus excluding the 84 percent of the county work force that
is not unionized.

“I’m
not a sports economist and I don’t know whether the stadium will be a net
benefit to Los Angeles when built.  But I do know that the project will get
thousands of construction workers back on the job, and that’s good for
everyone.  And without Speaker Perez’s keen understanding of both the
environmental and labor concerns involved, this would not have happened.”

Not
every environmentalist was sold as easily and as completely as the NRDC.
 

“The
concern is the chipping away at [the California Environmental Quality Act]
without looking at the long-term consequences,” said Bruce Reznik, executive
director of the Planning and Conservation League. “Is this going to really
result in better projects and more jobs?”

Of
course, it isn’t. Football stadiums are not big job creators and the Convention
Center will keep on costing taxpayers more than $40 million or more a year from
the General Fund for decades just as it has for the past few decades.

The
irony in this deal is that it appears to be a full and complete victory for Tim
Leiweke. He spent millions buying city and state politicians, cutting deals to
benefit labor and the environmentalists and even had to throw a couple of bucks
to the public in order to get his way for a project that could make Denver
billionaire a whole lot richer.

It
appears nothing except maybe the NFL questioning the financials will stop
construction of Farmers Field but there will always be a cloud hanging over it
and whether it’s living up to its commitments already written into law and soon
to be written into an EIR.

City
Hall, with its current leadership, will sign off on anything AEG submits in its
annual reports as it has already demonstrated but you never know what will
happen next.

There
might even be some leaders emerge someday who will stand up for what’s good for
the whole community and not just the special interests.

In the meantime, here’s something for the NRDC and their environmental pals to contemplate: It took everything they had to get the California Environmental Quality Act passed in the first place and it has been under siege for years for strangling the state’s economy and chasing good jobs — not hot dog and beer vendor jobs.

Now they have opened the door to gutting CEQA with the LA Times taking the lead with an editorial Monday calling the law “dated…anti-competitive…an impediment to economic growth” and suggesting that it is
“bad policy to offer special treatment to certain projects” and “raises questions
of favoritism and corruption.”