This just in from ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s wife in her 100-plus-room LA mansion: She doesn’t want expedited homebuilding for everyone else.
Ditto Jane Fonda, albeit from a more modest $6 million spread in Century City.
As The California Post reported this week, Schmidt and Fonda will lead a campaign against a Nov. 3 ballot measure that would relax facets of the onerous California Environmental Quality Act.
Prop. 45 would truncate some review timelines under CEQA, limit some aspects of litigation and streamline the infamous Environmental Impact Report, all to accelerate construction of projects such as new homes, water systems, health facilities and more.
The measure, imperfect though it may be, strives for a balance between legit environmental protections and getting projects built without years-long delays.
Still, the stars, so to speak, have lined up against it.
Wendy Schmidt, long a green activist, has dropped $5 million on the anti-Prop. 45 cause. (So much for getting money out of politics, long a Dem hobby horse.)
And the actress Fonda –– of Hanoi Jane infamy, yes –– has denounced the measure as a plot by polluters to destroy our air, water and health.
Of course that’s rich, coming from the rich.
Schmidt, Fonda and their ilk are little affected by California’s sky-high building costs and general lack of new, available and affordable housing.
Why not don a green halo and crusade against the big bad builders?
So far, though, the voters don’t buy it.
Some 73% of likely voters back Prop. 45, per a July poll from the Public Policy Institute of California. That figure includes 80% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans.
High costs linked to green building and the state’s lack of accessible housing hurt Californians across party lines.
And many have come to see that CEQA, adopted in 1970, is too often abused.
For decades, retailers, lawyers, labor unions and others have exploited CEQA rules to serve their own interests.
Some litigate to slow competitors.
Others use the law as leverage for unrelated concessions.
Construction unions, for example, at times threaten CEQA litigation unless they get Project Labor Agreements for above-market wages. Those higher labor costs in turn drive up housing prices.
So state voters don’t need celebrity campaigns against Prop. 45.
They don’t need virtue signaling that’s empty, like most of a 100-room mansion.
And they don’t need moneyed homeowners touting red tape that helps drive up housing costs for others.
What they do need is a real debate over the best fixes for an old law that nearly everyone agrees invites abuse, delay and high prices.