Don't give stadiums a pass on environmental laws
Jared Huffman
San Francisco Chronicle
01/25/2011
I'm not into face painting or tailgate parties, but I do like NFL football. I also care about our environment and the laws that protect it.
What, you may ask, do these subjects have to do with each other? I would have answered "nothing" if you asked me two years ago. But California seems to have gone stadium crazy with repeated attempts to exempt NFL stadiums from environmental safeguards protecting our air, water, quality of life and natural habitats.
One of those attempts, a 2009 bill to exempt a stadium in the City of Industry from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed. I was one of the few legislators who spoke against it at the time. I argued that the environment and communities affected by such a large project deserved the consideration and scrutiny CEQA provides and that the bill's purported urgency - including dubious promises of creating 18,000 jobs and the assertion that CEQA relief was key to Los Angeles' ability to attract a new NFL franchise - was just a ploy to avoid compliance with environmental laws.
Today, it's clear that legislators were sold a bill of goods. There is no stadium, there's been no construction, and not a single job has been created. But the 2009 legislation did have one lasting effect: It set a precedent of using a powerful lobbying effort in Sacramento to blow a hole in our environmental laws.
Now others are seeking to exploit that precedent. That we are debating exempting our standards at all, much less for NFL stadiums, is jaw-dropping, considering that CEQA is viewed nationwide as the gold standard for protecting natural resources, public health and our quality of life from poorly planned projects. But that's not stopping Philip Anschutz's Anschutz Entertainment Group. AEG, in partnership with the Wasserman Media Group, wants to build an NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles - a project raising issues about traffic congestion, parking, smog, effects on disadvantaged communities, and other factors that must be addressed under CEQA.
AEG is lobbying for a CEQA exemption even more egregious than the 2009 stadium legislation. It doesn't want to be burdened by the public process of an Environmental Impact Report in a city that already has smog and pollution issues. It wants to bypass CEQA's public scrutiny of its stadium project, even though it wants $350 million in state-bond-financed funds to demolish existing buildings on the proposed stadium site.
