New California Assembly Committee Aims to Reduce Permitting Obstacles for Housing and Climate Projects

The Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform held its first hearing on June 18, 2024, commencing its efforts to address California’s housing and climate crises by reforming the state’s land use permitting regime. According to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, housing and infrastructure projects “often face years of review, at multiple levels of government, in arcane and oblique processes.” Wicks stated that the Select Committee was accordingly formed to “systematically examine existing permitting processes and seek out meaningful solutions.” The Select Committee plans to hold additional hearings through the end of 2024 and release a white paper in early 2025 that will include findings and recommendations for subsequent legislative action. Allen Matkins will report on these future hearings and on the white paper planned for release in early 2025.

Select Committees are small bodies created within the State Assembly that provide legislators a platform to solicit testimony and generate policy recommendations focused on a specific topic. Here, the Select Committee was created to “give the Assembly a meaningful opportunity” to convene interested stakeholders and the public to understand how the permitting processes can better serve California’s housing and climate goals.

Assemblymember Wicks underscored the importance of permitting reform in her opening remarks: “we are poorly positioned to make the change that California desperately needs right now, given the current state of affairs with our regulatory system.” According to Wicks, it takes four months to permit a housing project in New York City but eighteen months in San Francisco, and Texas permits three-and-a-half times more solar power generation than California annually. Assemblymember Wood echoed these concerns, explaining that the Select Committee’s work would address the “hideous cost” and “time extension” projects often face under the current regulatory regime, which makes them “completely untenable.”

At the first hearing, panelists from academia, government, and industry shared their perspectives on California’s permitting process, which San Francisco Public Utilities Commissioner Newsha Ajami described as “widely recognized to be inefficient and marked by delays.” The panelists offered recommendations to address state and local permitting obstacles. For example, UC Irvine Professor Nick Marantz suggested reducing development impact fees and inclusionary unit requirements to lower the cost of developing new multifamily residential projects. Panelists also identified issues with current California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements. Professor Marantz suggested eliminating certain qualifying criteria for the in-fill housing categorical exemptions to facilitate housing production. Marissa Mitchell, head of environmental permitting for Intersect Power, commented that CEQA counterintuitively requires solar developers to mitigate impacts to farmland that is subject to water restrictions imposed through the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and already slated to be fallowed.

More broadly, the Select Committee’s work tracks with other recent legislative efforts to streamline approval of housing and energy projects. For instance, the Little Hoover Commission recently released a report to the Legislature and Governor recommending targeted CEQA reforms to improve the law by “allowing for beneficial projects to proceed more rapidly, without sacrificing necessary environmental protections.” (See our Legal Alert here for additional details.) And in 2023 alone, the Legislature adopted a range of new laws aimed at facilitating housing and energy development, including AB 1633 (expansion of Housing Accountability Act protections to address aspects of CEQA review); SB 423 (streamlined ministerial approval for certain housing projects); and SB 147 (expanded incidental take permit coverage for renewable energy, water, and transportation projects), and as summarized in our recent Legal Alerts here and here. Looking toward the future, Allen Matkins will follow the Select Committee’s progress and report on its white paper scheduled for release in early 2025.