What is it?

Prop 45 adds a new chapter to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the state law that requires agencies to study a project's environmental effects before approving it. The chapter sets deadlines and limits lawsuits for eight categories of projects.

The eight categories, which Prop 45 calls "essential projects", are housing, clean energy, water, public health, public safety, broadband, education facilities, and transportation. Using the chapter is the applicant's choice. An applicant, which can be a company, a public agency, or a utility, may use all of it, part of it, or none of it. Essential projects still go through environmental review, and agencies keep the power to approve or deny them.

The housing category covers any housing, including market-rate. There is no affordability requirement anywhere in the definition.

Deadlines

The longest clock is 365 days for an environmental impact report, then 180 days for a negative declaration, 90 days for an exemption, and 30 days to decide whether an application is complete. The main review clocks run in business days, not calendar days, so the 365-day EIR clock works out to roughly 1.4 calendar years, longer than CEQA's existing one-calendar-year deadline.

Only the applicant can extend a review deadline. If an agency misses a deadline, the applicant can demand a hearing where the agency must vote the project up or down using whatever environmental documents exist, and the applicant can sue to force it.

Lawsuits

Prop 45 also narrows what courts can do: a challenger's claims are limited to "objective existing laws", and a court that finds a violation may block only the part of the project affected by it until it is fixed, but may not order the agency to rescind its approval.

Read the full annotated legal text →