I want to talk about a really important bit of California environmental law and why
I think it's stupid and harmful. And that law is called SEQUA. Now,
any of you who are involved in construction or building projects, especially the
housing developments things of that sort, will know a little bit about SEQUA.
SEQUA CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act. It was a law that was
passed in California in nineteen seventy and other another one of the incredibly liberal things
that Ronald Reagan did when he was governor of California. In addition to legalizing
abortion, he also passed SEQUA. And what SEQUA does is it basically I
think when it was passed in nineteen seventy, people did not envision Clearly,
people didn't envision the way in which it would be used today. So what's
the issue. Well, if a real estate developers building a project and it's
going to adversely impact the environment, who has standing to sue? It?
All has to do with much of it, anyway, has to do with
standing to sue. Standing is a really important legal doctrin. It's basically it's
basically the question of who is allowed to file a lawsuit over some harm that
has happened or some actionable event. In most cases, standing is fairly obvious.
If someone crashes again, I always use the car crash example. So
someone crashes a car into agent I'll use our intrepid producer here at Power Talk,
Agent Squires. If someone crashes a car into Agent Squire's house, I
will feel really bad for him. I will feel really upset on his behalf.
But I can't sue the guy who crashed into his car. I can't
sue him. If I file a law suit, I go in front of
the judge and the judge says, why are you suing? Why should I
not dismiss this case because you don't have standing to sue. I would say,
well, Judge, I was really upset when this guy crashed into my
friend, Agent Squire's house. And the judge would look at me and say,
well, you being upset, that's not enough for standing. So to
have standing, you have to show some kind of actionable harm that happened to
you, physical harm, economic harm, et cetera. It has to be
some sort of tangible harm that impacts you. So me being upset on behalf
of my friend, No, I'm not allowed to sue. Agent Squire's is
allowed to sue if someone crashes a car into his house. So the doctrine
of standing is basically the doctrine of who has the right to bring this lawsuit?
And this was the issue with environmental concerns that there was a thought,
well, if some real estate developer is harming the environment through his building project,
who can speak for the endangered animals who are impacted? Who can file
a lawsuit on behalf of the fishies? Unless a real estate project or something
is actually directly with a short enough chain of causation impacting some group of actual
people, nobody really has standing to file a lawsuit. So you have to
make up some way to challenge. Basically, in order to regulate the environment,
in order to protect the environment, you need to come up with some
system to allow someone to bring a lawsuit to stop certain kinds of development if
it is unduly harmful to the environment. Now you'd think that this should be
in the hands of the public, of some kind of public actor being able
to enforce California environmental laws and bring lawsuits to challenge something, or have some
process or some sort of environmental review process that sat with the government, So
the California EPA or something like that. But no, in our infinite stupidity,
we developed SEQUA. Here's a piece about SEQUA from two years ago.
This is from the regulatory review the Inequalities of California's Environmental Quality Act, written
by Catherine McKean. Lawmakers originally intended this law, the California Environmental Quality Act,
to benefit people and the planet, but in the fifty years since California's
adoption of SEQUA, its environmental review requirements may have also been used by non
environmental groups to fight sustainable and equitable development. Increasingly, some critics insist that
reforms are needed to restore SEQUA to its original intent. So what SEQUA does
is basically, Okay, we have these California environmental standards, laws, etc.
Who's enforcing it. Well, we're not having the government enforce it.
It's not just the EPA enforcing it. We allow private actors to enforce California
law by filing lawsuits against a construction project, business undertaking a construction project,
Individual, private persons, or private organizations. The Sierra Club can file a
lawsuit against a construction company to say this construction job is violating environmental law on
this in this way. But it's not just limited to environmental groups. It's
not just limited to private persons. Anyone can do it. So one of
the things that's happening is that you have basically like non disinterested parties businesses trying
to stop certain kinds of development projects in ways that seem self interested towards their
bottom line. It's not all just I mean, look and no environmental lawyer
is doing this without an interest for his bottom line. But it's not just
nonprofit organizations following these lawsuits. As Catherine McKean writes in this piece in the
Regulatory Review, she says lawmakers originally intended this law to benefit people in the
planet, and in the fifty years since its adoption, its environmental review requirements
may have also been used by non environmental groups to fight sustainable and equitable development.
So non environmental groups are using this to block real estate projects that they
don't like, and in fact, the statute has been used to do things
that are are just flat out super harmful, maybe even for the environment.
It's been used to fight the construction of homeless shelters, to block denser urban
housing. Okay, many of you have heard the phrase nimby not in my
backyard. So this is the tendency that people who already have homes in a
certain area, they don't want a bunch of new housing to be constructed,
and especially they don't want high density housing apartment complexes because they think, well,
apartment complexes bring more crime, they bring people with lower socioeconomic bracket,
and this will lower the value of my home. But in the meantime,
California desperately needs more housing. So sequa, this enlightened lefty thing has been
used to stop this very urgently needed thing of more middle and lower middle class
housing. It's been used to delay solar projects, to challenge public transit proposals.
It even barred the enrollment of over three thousand new students at UC Berkeley
in twenty twenty two. And so basically California does this in a lot of
respects where California just sort of takes the posture of we're not just going to
have the state enforce a given body of law. This is also the case,
by the way, with labor law, employment law. We're not just
going to have the state enforce it. We're also going to encourage private individuals
to enforce it. Okay, California has this in a particular way with labor
law as well, but basically the idea that California is almost outsourcing its environmental
law enforcement to private actors suing and without any sort of clear sense of like
the motives of these people who might be suing, and whether the outcomes they're
pushing for or in any way are are really drastically harmful to some other purpose.
And that's the thing that I think these environmental wackos refuse to acknowledge,
is that there has to be a give and take. Yes, any construction
project is going to have some kind of adverse environmental impact, and it's probably
also worth it. It's probably worthwhile given that human beings are part of this
environment in which we live. It's probably a good thing to build more houses
so that in every house in California doesn't cost five hundred thousand, six hundred
thousand dollars. So maybe there's a twenty three year old in this state who
could maybe somehow buy a house without being a millionaire first. But no,
I think these liberals, these liberal environmental groups are supported by and maybe even
staffed by ultra elite, wealthy people who already have their eight hundred thousand San
Francisco house, eight hundred thousand dollars San Francisco house, and they basically just
do not care if another thing ever gets built. And not just houses,
but also the infrastructure, the infrastructure needed to sustain houses, you know,
stuff like water, stuff like reservoirs, stuff like dams, stuff like you
know, it's you know, building up the agricultural sector. They don't care
about any of it. They have this environmental vision where human beings are not
front and center and if anything, are a little more than harmful interlopers.
Now, when we return, I want to talk about how SEQUA is being
used to try to block the building of a new redis that even Gavin Newsom
wants to build. That's next on the John Girardi Show. SEQUA, the
California Environmental Quality Act, is basically this cudgel that environmental wackos use to prevent
any new thing from being built or developed in California. It's a major reason
why construction in California is so expensive, because basically you're afraid as a developer
that some jerk can just swoop in from the outside and file a lawsuit to
stop your project on some kind of specious environmental grounds, and sequa is kind
of this remarkable thing because it's a big, massive exception to the traditional American
legal doctrine around standing. Who is allowed to sue someone who has standing?
As I gave the example, if someone crashes a car into agent Squire's house,
I don't have the right to sue. I might be really mad,
i might be really upset, but I'm not allowed to sue. Only Agent
Squires can sue, or you know, if he passes away, then the
heirs of his estate or whatever. But I'm not allowed to sue. I
don't have the standing to sue, even if I'm like really upset, because
I haven't suffered the harm. They didn't crash into my house. My property
wasn't damaged. I haven't suffered in a physical harm. I haven't suffered some
kind of economic harm. I'm just upset for my friend, and that's not
enough to give me standing to sue. What is happening with environmental law in
California is that for years, harms to the environment are able to be vindicated
in court by private entities filing lawsuits who are not themselves directly impacted by a
thing. Okay, basically that we've created a right of action, a right
to sue, private cause of action that is extended to people who are not
directly harmed by a given building project, real estate project, et cetera.
Here's a good example. California environmental groups appeal court ruling in favor of plan
to build a new reservoir. This is looks like this is a Sacramento be
thing. Maybe it's a Fresno b thing. By Ari Plachta. A coalition
of environmental groups appeal to court rejection of their challenge to California's plan to build
sites reservoir in a valley north of Sacramento, its first major new major reservoir
in decades. They argue the project would harm and here's why. They argue
the project would harm Sacramento River ecosystems and threaten imperiled fish species. The groups
include the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, Friends of the River,
California Sport Fishing Protection Alliance, California Water Impact Network, and Save California
Salmon for the Sake of the Delta community and the fish and wildlife already struggling
in this sensitive ecosystem. I hope the true environmental harms of this reservoir will
be taken seriously, said John Boose, Senior council at the Center for Biological
Diversity. There are still numerous hurdles before the site's reservoir, and that's because
the state's strong environmental laws demand a thorough review for potentially damaging projects. In
a May ruling, a Yolo County Superior Court judge cited against advocates and determined
that the project's environmental review was sufficient. Governor Gavin nuws Some celebrated the decision,
saying the projects had cleared a major hurdle. He had sought to speed
the California Environmental Quality Act process through an Infrastructure Streamline ning law that requires courts
to decide on environmental challenges within two hundred and seventy days when feasible. California
needs more water storage and we have no time to waste. Projects like the
site's reservoir will capture rain and snow runoff to supply millions of homes with clean
drinking water, Newman Newsom said after the ruling. With a maximum capacity of
one point five million acre feet of water, state officials say at its max
state officials say, at its maximum, the proposed four point five billion dollar
reservoir will store enough water to supply the yearly usage of three million households.
To do so, state agencies would inundate nearly fourteen thousand acres of ranch lands
in Glen and Caloosa Counties with water diverted from the Sacramento River through a new
system of dams, pipelines, and a bridge. Environmental advocates with the group
Friends of the River and other groups have long opposed the project, voicing concerns
that diverting water would harm struggling fish populations and the ailing ecosystem of the Sacramento
San Juan River Delta. So the Sacramento River come in from the north,
the San Juquin River coming up from the south. They both meet at the
delta. It's the point where the rivers sort of converge and branch off into
a bunch of tiny little branches that flow out into the San Francisco Bay from
the delta. Water from the San Francisco from the Sacramento and San Juan rivers
then gets pumped south into two major canal waterway systems. The Central Valley System,
which was built by the federal government and provides a lot of agricultural water
for us in the San Lauquin Valley. And then the California State Water System,
which is run by the state and which is largely bringing water to southern
California for private individual home use, and liberals are constantly the whole state is
sort of like grind grinding to a halt as far as its water provision because
of chinook salmon populations, delta smelt, and other kinds of fish in the
Delta. So the contention here is, hey, we need more water storage.
Even Gavin Newsom, It's a funny thing about being governor is that at
a certain point the buck stops with you and you just kind of have to
be the adult in the room in the way that you don't have to if
you're just a state assembly member or a state senator. So there are certain
things like this where Newsom is so compelled by the obvious need of the state
that he's actually somewhat being the adult in the room. So even Newsom is
saying, Hey, we really need to build some kind of water storage system,
and we need to streamline the sequel process to get through, Let's get
through all the fight. He's not proposing to abolish SEQUA because he knows if
he does that all of his environmental lefty supporters will just pitch an absolute fit.
But basically what he's saying is, look, can we just have a
streamline process where we just get a decision from any judges about sequel challenges within
two hundred and seventy days? But just you know, can we at least
just get this done in nine months? And so here's Newsome fighting for this.
But who's opposing it? A bunch of environmental groups who and their claim
is not that any human beings are gonna be harmed by this. I don't
know. Maybe they can make some claim that some fishermen might possibly downstream be
harmed by this, but like that's the thing. Environmental law is so different
from everything else. Like if we were just using normal doctrines of standing,
I don't know that these groups would have any ability to be in this courtroom
at all. The judge would ask them, well, how are you,
why are you filing this lawsuit? How we're how would you be harmed by
this dam And they'd say, well, we wouldn't be harmed, your honor,
but we think all these fishies would certainly be harmed, and the judge
would say, well, you're not a fish and you don't have any right
to the fish, and they're not your property or something that are being harmed.
So I'm sorry, but I'm dismissing your lawsuit for on the grounds of
lack of standing. Get out of my courtroom. That's how it would operate
in a normal universe. And so here you have the state government saying the
state government, which Gavin Newsom represents, Okay, the state is saying,
we, you know, California environmental law is our task to enforce. We
did the environmental review for this thing. We think it's fine, we think
we should build it. They've already done it. But because of SEQUA,
the California Environmental Quality Act, it allows private people to interject themselves and try
for and for private individuals who don't have any direct stake necessarily in the outcome
here. It's no, there's no direct harm that they are facing. They
are allowed to try to sue to, in their eyes, enforce California environmental
law when because they think that the state hasn't enforced their own laws well enough.
So here's the State of California trying to build this law. Its own
environmental agencies have done the environmental impact studies, they think it's fine. But
no, you have private people coming into sue on top of it to try
to stop this and gumming up this whole project. And that's the absurdity of
California's environmental law. I guess I understand the idea of, hey, someone
needs to be able to, in a sense, speak for the fishies.
Someone needs to be able to represent the interest of the environment against businesses,
construction projects, et cetera. Well, let the California EPA do that.
Why do we let private groups like the Sierra Club? And how does the
Sierra Club make its money. It makes its money by being active and doing
stuff. If they just say, ah, we decided not to file a
lawsuit about the site's reservoir because yeah, well, let's stay of California said
it was fine. How does that look to their donors. I mean,
they're they're they are incentivized to file file more lawsuits for stuff. So yeah,
California environmental law is insane and it's stopping even a water storage project that
is so sensible. Even Gavin Newsom wants to get it done. When we
return the major construction projects that are going to be necessitated by the high speed
rail and how it is going to jank things up for years to come.
That is next on the John Girardi Show. All right, folks, let's
talk about eminent domain and eminent domain seizures. What does that mean. Well,
the federal government and state governments all have processes for the government to take
your land for the sake of some kind of public project. That's right.
The government has the right to take your land for the sake of some public
project. Now they need to pay you for the land. They need to
pay you the fair market value of the land, but they have the right
to do it. Classic example is, all right, we got a road
one way going east, one way going west. We want to expand it
to two lanes going east, two lanes going west. So two lanes to
four lanes. Well, if you do that, you're gonna have to take
a chunk out of missus Smith and mister White and mister Gray's front yards.
Okay, you have to take a chunk out of it. So the government
has to go to you know, mister Smith and mister White and miss Gray
whatever whoever their names are, has to go to them and say, hey,
we're taking a chunk of your front yard. We are going to pay
you this amount because we did a fair market assessment. Blah blah blah blah
blah. We think your house is worth this much. We think this chunk
of your land is worth this much, so we're going to take it.
But here's money for this. But if mister White feels that that valuation is
not is incorrect, under values his property, he can go to court and
say, hey, I am challenging this. I think i'm my land is
worth more. And you know, they go through the legal process and maybe
they have a settlement, whatever happens. But that's what eminent domain is.
Okay, it involves you have to and and California has had to do this
with the high speed rail project. I have no idea how and as difficult
and expensive as eminent domain seizures of people's property is, you know, when
you're cutting across a corner of some farmers field out in Madera County, I
cannot imagine how much more expensive and more difficult it's going to be once we
start trying to do eminent domain seizures in big American cities. Well, that
is pretty much what the City of Fresno is going to start getting into.
So piece in Thresno b by Tim Shehan. Construction on major changes to a
central Fresno railroad crossing won't begin for about two years, but the city is
already turning to the court system to acquire some of the needed property through eminent
domain. Over the past few months, the Fresno City Council has adopted five
resolutions officially declaring that particular pieces of land are needed for the one hundred and
fifty million dollar project to rebuild the intersection of Blackstone and McKinley Avenues at the
BNSF railway tracks. The streets are each to be lowered by as much as
twenty five feet to funnel traffic beneath the existing railroad tracks. So basically the
railroad tracks are going to stay flat. Right now, they have like railroad
crossings at that intersection, and you know the big arm that goes down ding
ding ding ding, and then the train goes by. So instead we're just
gonna have We're gonna make that intersection into basically like an underpass. So you've
got to sink that section of road twenty five feet down. That's a lot
and so cars will be able just to drive underneath it. Now. Among
the businesses on the targeted properties are the Carl's Junior fast food restaurant at the
northwest corner of Blackstone and McKinley, the Dutch Bros. Coffee in a shopping
center on the northeast corner of the intersection. There's Dutch Bros. Over there,
a ceramics business, an autobody shop, and an auto smog shop.
All right, so how will eminent domain affect the Fresno Railroad project? Eminent
domain or condemnation, is a legal process in which a government agency can go
to court to acquire property for a public project when the agency and the property
owner cannot agree on price or terms. Okay, the first step is adoption.
The start of the eminent domain process doesn't mean that negotiations on any of
the properties are beyond repair. The city is willing to continue negotiations with the
property owners, but in order to maintain the project's schedule, this step in
determining the necessity of the parcel is critical, said Nancy Bruno, a supervising
real estate agent with the city's Capital Projects Department. Now the Blackstone McKinley construction
timeline. And by all of this, I mean presumably, I don't think
this is the high speed rail system specifically. Okay, this is a basf
existing rail line, but this is all part and parcel of this effort to
pour tons of money into downtown revitalization that seemingly is all centered around rail,
around the high speed rail system, and here an updating the existing rail stuff
that is going. You know, the high speed rail is going to be
flowing right alongside the normal rail, and gosh, I just feel like this
is gonna be an absolute money pit to very little public benefit. I feel
like all this downtown revitalization that is centered around the idea we're going to have
this high speed rail station downtown and people are gonna come there and we'll have
businesses around there, and I just don't think anyone is going to use it.
It would be one thing if the high speed rail project was really gonna
go from La to San Francisco and Fresno was a hub in that, but
for now it's not. For now, it's merced to Bakersfield, and I
just don't know how many people in Fresno are really realistically going to use it
when you can just get in your car and hop on the nine and just
get there as opposed to getting to the station forty minutes early, paying whatever
you have to pay for for a ticket, get on the train. Train
has to probably make a couple of stops, So it's not like it's gonna
be blindingly fast. You get to Bakersfield, and then what do you do.
Hopefully wherever you need to go is walking distance from the train station,
or you just need to take an uber or rent a car or something.
I just don't think it's gonna be very practical. And I think, I
mean, this is due to decisions that were made, and you know,
it's not like Jerry Dyer came up with this plan. He sort of inherited
this plan. I think he's making the best of it that he can.
But like, I just don't think this is a good idea. So here's
what just this one project, Blackstone and McKinley. It's a big time intersection,
big time intersection. Right, it's very close to You've got San Joaque
Memorial High School very close by. You've got Fresno City College very close spy.
Blackstone and McKinley is a really big intersection. Here's how this is going
to gum things up and is right alongside the forty one. The grade separation
of the rail crossing at Blackstone and McKinley has been a priority traffic project for
years for pedestrian vehicle safety and traffic flow on two of the city's major thoroughfares.
The city reports that four people have died in either train versus pedestrian or
train versus vehicle collisions near the intersection over the past ten years. Dozens of
trains, both BNSF freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains passed through the intersection each
day, creating an average delay for drivers of nearly three minutes for each train.
Acquiring all the properties needed for the grade separation is expected to run through
the summer of twenty twenty five. Okay, so it's going to take them
through summer. It's going to take them another year to get all the properties.
Engineering designs are expected to be completed by mid to late twenty twenty five,
and construction is slated to commens in the spring of twenty twenty six.
And continue into the spring of twenty twenty nine, so Blackstone and McKinley will
be gummed up from twenty twenty six to twenty twenty nine. It's likely that
several dozen properties will be at least partially affected by changes in street elevation for
the two roads and the retaining walls needed to shore up the embankments, effectively
cutting off street access to the sites. In the case of Dutch Bros,
The popular coffee business, City traffic engineer Alex Gonzalez told the city council in
June thirteen that retaining walls along McKinley Avenue and a new driveway into the small
shopping center will render inaccessible the exit for the existing drive through lane. The
owners of at least six properties near the Blackstone McKinley intersection have agreed to terms
to sell their land to the city. Those include a quintet of houses south
of McKinley at Glen Avenue and Calavera Street, and the owner of a one
point three to seven acre commercial property that is home to several businesses on the
west side of Blackstone Avenue, just north of the Carls Junior Restaurant. Those
six purchase agreements add up to a total of more than four point seven million
dollars. The city has already spent four point seven million dollars to acquire all
the properties that are going to be impacted by this thing. So for three
years, this intersection, which again Blackstone and McKinley, Like Fresno City College
is just west of there, Samwakei Memorial High School is just east of there.
You get off the I mean, just envision this, how would you
get to Fresno City College. Well, probably for a lot of people,
depending on where they are. You get on the forty one, you get
off at mcare, you go west on Blackstone to Fresno City. Blackstone and
McKinley is gonna be a nightmare for the next three years for well, not
for the next three years, from twenty twenty six through twenty twenty nine.
That's gonna be a huge, huge nightmare. That's just gonna be an absolute
zoo And I guess, I guess, I just don't. I'm not sure
if I see the benefit there. I mean, yeah, the end project
looks very beautiful and very nice, and they have this beautiful, colorful map,
you know, showing how lovely it's going to look when it's all done.
I mean, yeah, I've been at that intersection when a train is
going by and think, oh my gosh. Of course, now the train
is coming by, and it does it does hold up traffic. And obviously
it's terrible that anyone dies at a railroad crossing. I guess though, I'm
just the city just seems to be making a lot of decisions around trains,
and I really wonder if that is necessary wise, and we're going to have
I mean, if you think this construction project is going to be bad,
just I mean, all of the construction that's happening is going to keep happening
in downtown Presno. And by the way, they say it's going to take
three years, tack on at least another six months for that. So we're
talking twenty twenty six, quite possibly through twenty thirty when we return. I
want to talk a little bit about this June teenth thing, which is today
next on the John Durardy Show. Today is June teenth, and I remember,
like many of you, hearing about this and being I'm told that this
was obviously a thing, that this is a thing that African Americans have been
celebrating for forever, And what do you mean, You've never heard of it?
And I have a sense that most Americans had never. If you had
asked them in say twenty fifteen, what Juneteenth was, ninety nine percent of
Americans or a huge majority of Americans would have told you. I have no
idea what this is. The thing in itself doesn't seem like it's anything bad.
This is a day in which African slaves in Texas learned that they were
free and that slavery was abolished, and so it's a commemoration of the emancipation
of African American slaves, but seemingly done in a way that is distinct from
the date of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. I have nothing, again the inherent idea,
but it is curious that this has been pushed so, particularly by people
on the left right now, and I suspect that the reason for the push
is to build up more of the so called anti racist narrative, the anti
racist narrative being no, no, no, anti racism is not equality for
all. It's promoting effective discrimination on behalf of black people and against white people.
Past discrimination can only be countered by current day discrimination the other way.
That's that's the thesis of the quote anti racist. Ebram can can be kind
of school of thought. And I have a sense that, given a lot
of the sloganing by some of these left wing Black Lives matters folks, is
Juneteenth is our Independence Day? I think it's it's deliberately picked because it's near
the fourth of July, and the idea is to set up dueling quote independence
days, and that I don't like. I think that it's an attempt to
further divide America on the grounds of race, and that is a thing I
very much dislike. That'll do it for John gj Alady Show. See next
time on Power Talk.