Back in 1982, Jerry Brown signed into law a bill creating a California High Speed Rail project, and exempting that project from the rules of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The project stalled out and died in 1983, and when high speed rail was revived in California in the mid-1990s, it was made subject to CEQA.

As Robert Goodspeed and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) have both argued, CEQA is a flawed method of conducting urban and infrastructure planning. The law is well-intentioned, but creates incentives for project opponents to slow and delay things they don’t like, instead of pushing both government planners and other stakeholders to engage in a collaborative process that can both expedite plans and ensure that environmentally friendly projects, such as HSR, don’t get bogged down for reasons that have nothing to do with environmental quality.

As I argued on this topic late last year, California needs a more holistic, statewide planning process such as that found in Washington or Oregon, that can include public input without the negative aspects of CEQA. In the absence of such a process, I argued that California would instead see a greater push to simply exempt projects from CEQA entirely.

That’s exactly what is beginning to happen, as the Palo Alto City Council discovered last night:

Palo Alto is girding for battle against proposed legislation that could make the California high-speed-rail project exempt from environmental regulations.

“There is great concern that this is a real betrayal of the commitments made to this city and this council and the communities up and down the Peninsula,” Mayor Pat Burt said during a City Council discussion Monday night.

He cited statements made by both state and rail-authority officials — even as the authority was quietly working on legislation to nullify the review requirements….

One of the city’s goals would be to oppose a series of state bills that exempt the project from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), city officials said at a Monday night discussion of the project.

Several council members said they were concerned about the prospect of the controversial rail project being exempted from CEQA, which mandates detailed environmental reviews and public hearings for major projects. Over the past year, Palo Alto and other Peninsula cities used the CEQA process to send comments to the rail authority and challenge the agency’s decisions….

The proposed bills would exempt “critical infrastructure projects” from review. The bills would enable the state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency to select projects to be exempted from environmental review.

The article’s author, Gennady Sheyner, didn’t explain the statements Burt cited – I’ve never heard anyone from the California High Speed Rail Authority suggest exempting the project from CEQA. If they have been making those statements, I’d love to know about it. Instead we’ve seen the CHSRA be absolute sticklers on CEQA, especially as regards the Transbay Terminal project, where Quentin Kopp and other CHSRA officials have insisted that a Beale Street alternative be studied to conform to CEQA requirements.

Still, Burt is right that there is indeed a push in Sacramento to provide more CEQA exemptions, although so far there has been no public indication that these exemptions would include or are intended to include high speed rail. Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing this as a jobs creation plan, though environmental groups like the Sierra Club are strongly opposed.

AB 1805, introduced by moderate Democrat Charles Calderon and Republican Brian Nestande, would:

require the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency to select projects that meet specified requirements from specified regions for each calendar year between 2010 and 2014. The bill would exempt from judicial review, pursuant to CEQA, a lead agency’s decision to certify the EIR of, or to adopt a mitigated negative declaration based on an initial study for, the selected projects, a lead agency’s and responsible agency’s approval of the selected project, and the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency’s selection of the projects.

I can see why Palo Alto officials are upset by even the hint that HSR might be given a CEQA exemption. But at the same time, Palo Alto and neighboring cities have been repeatedly proving the shortcomings of the CEQA process. Menlo Park and Atherton sued the Authority over the Pacheco Pass alignment and lost that case (the judge’s findings regarding the EIR’s flaws did not pertain to the choice of Pacheco over Altamont, but to problems with using Union Pacific right of way that would have existed on the Altamont alignment as well). Palo Alto has made noises about their own lawsuits.

More significantly, Palo Alto officials do not appear to be interested in engaging in an open-minded approach to project planning. At last night’s meeting a clear “tunnel or nothing” faction on the council made its views known:

But even though the analysis won’t be out for at least three weeks, several council members said the city should lobby the authority for underground tunnels. Council members Greg Scharff and Nancy Shepherd both said the city should firmly oppose any plan to build an elevated rail line and demand tunnels. Councilwoman Karen Holman urged her colleagues to avoid committing to any design options until a fuller analysis is available.

“It’s premature because we don’t have the EIR,” Holman said. “We don’t know what any of the impacts are.”

I want to be very clear that I am not advocating HSR be exempted from CEQA at this time. But statements like those from Scharff and Shepherd aren’t going to help ensure that Governor Schwarzenegger’s CEQA exemption plans fail. Instead such unrealistic and unhelpful attitudes are only going to give more fuel to the anti-CEQA fire. Let’s hope Palo Alto chooses a more constructive path toward helping effectively build and implement high speed rail in their city.