A suspicious lack of specifics in this anti-CEQA rant. Since the author lives in San Francisco, I’m surprised she didn’t cite our litigation against the city’s Bicycle Plan as an example of the abuse of the law. Turns out that the city did no environmental review at all of the 500-page plan, which was an obvious violation of CEQA, since the plan will eliminate thousands of parking spaces and dozens of traffic lanes on busy city streets to make bike lanes. Walmart doesn’t like CEQA, either, since it has to do an environmental study when it wants to open a new big box store. Beckman needs to cite some specific examples of abuse.

See my recent post on CEQA and the Holland & Knight study, which was really about how sluggishly local governments deal with CEQA, not with the law itself: http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2015/07/zombie-falsehood-about-bicycle-plan.html

See also “CEQA: The Litigation Myth”: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dpettit/CEQA%20Litigation%20Analysis%20FINAL.pdf