New Damaging State Law Erases Decades of Community Environmental Protections

By Douglas Carstens, Dan Silver, and Aleja Cretcher [biographies included below]

Recently, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 131 (SB 131) and Assembly Bill 130 (AB 130) as budget trailer bills pushed by the Governor and outside the normal legislative process. This article focuses on the dangers posed by SB 131, which a coalition of 237 environmental and environmental justice groups deems “an unprecedented rollback to California’s fundamental environmental and community protections” [1].   

Why is this legislation such a serious problem? SB 131 contains extensive exemptions from the state’s premier environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The most egregious of this bill’s exemptions is for a vaguely defined category of industrial projects known as “advanced manufacturing.”   The changes brought by SB 131 do not bode well for democracy or environmental protection in California.  

Released on a Friday and passed the following Monday, SB 131 bypassed the standard legislative process, including review by policy committees that typically analyze bills in detail and solicit public input. Given this rushed process, the public did not see the language of SB 131 until just three days before it was signed into law on June 30, 2025. At the Senate Budget Committee hearing on June 30, it was clear that senators had had little time to review the bill language, and many had serious concerns about some of its provisions. Afterwards, leading bill proponents refused to answer press questions about the process [2]. 

Given widespread concerns and public outcry, the bill’s author, the Senate President Pro Tempore, and other legislators have committed to considering cleanup legislation to address three of the bill’s most problematic elements. 

First, the Legislature committed to reconsider SB 131’s broad exemption for “advanced manufacturing.” This CEQA exemption strips communities of the ability to protect their families and neighborhoods from industrial pollution. By allowing major industrial projects to sidestep CEQA’s requirements for public disclosure and environmental mitigation—even when located near homes, schools, and hospitals—the legislation places vulnerable communities directly in harm’s way.

Tellingly, SB 131 adopts an extremely broad definition of “advanced manufacturing,” borrowing language from another state law that defines it as “systems that result from substantive advancement, whether incremental or breakthrough, beyond current industry standards, in the production of materials and products.” This vague and expansive language could encompass battery and energy storage manufacturing, defense and aerospace production, rare earth extraction (including strip mining), as well as semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.

Such industrial processes typically involve hazardous chemicals and solvents. At the Senate Budget Committee hearing, the bill’s author downplayed the risks these projects pose to communities, citing a supposed safeguard: that only projects built on land zoned for industrial use would qualify for the exemption. This safeguard falls flat, however, in view of the vast number of residents in environmental justice communities whose homes directly border industrially zoned land. Most “advanced manufacturing”  facilities are likely to be sited in or near disadvantaged communities historically burdened by decades of industrial pollution.

California already has thousands of hazardous waste sites statewide that threaten public health.  Many California communities have the nation’s dirtiest air, and major groundwater supplies are highly polluted [3]. For example, Santa Clara County is home to 23 sites in the US EPA’s Superfund program [4], meaning they are highly contaminated and earmarked for cleanup. Almost all of them are located where there once were (or still are) high-tech manufacturing sites [5]. 

Dangerous projects that SB 131 would exempt are located throughout California.  For example, the Mountain Pass Mine in the Mojave Desert was shut down in the early 2000s after a series of radioactive waste spills [6], but resumed operations in 2017 and was awarded state tax credits as an “advanced manufacturing” facility in 2021. 

In Southeast Los Angeles, the Exide battery recycling plant for decades released dangerous levels of lead dust — a neurotoxin known to impair development — into nearby communities, affecting over 100,000 people beyond an immediate radius of 4.5 miles [7]. Since its closure in 2015, the plant has become the site of the most expensive environmental remediation project in California history. The state has already classified numerous metal recycling plants as “advanced manufacturing” projects.

On the Central Coast, widespread concerns about public health and safety arose after a fire at one of the world's largest lithium-ion battery plants, known as Vistra Energy's Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California [8], which led to the temporary evacuation of about 1,200 residents on January 16, 2025 [9]. SB 131 would exempt facilities like this from environmental review.

Under SB 131, overburdened communities will lose even their ability to be informed about proposed projects, such as Mountain Pass Mine, Exide, and Vistra Energy Storage. And the impacts of these facilities will not be mitigated.

The second provision of SB 131 that the Legislature committed to reconsider is the bill’s failure to protect habitat for endangered and threatened species. While exempting many types of projects, the bill excludes projects from those exemptions if they are located on “natural and protected lands.” The problem is that these “natural and protected lands” are defined narrowly; the definition mainly covers areas, like public parks, that are already protected and does not include sensitive habitat. That means that under SB 131, a large development project would be entirely exempt from CEQA even if located on habitat for an endangered or threatened species. Therefore, no public notice and no mitigation. This is unacceptable and a major reversal of state policy. Notably, other CEQA exemptions, like AB 130, passed in conjunction with SB 131, do exclude projects located on such habitat. 

A critical example of unprotected land is the proposed “advanced manufacturing” facility on San Bruno Mountain in San Mateo County—home to the only federal effort to repopulate the checkerspot butterfly species. Under SB 131, this facility would likely qualify for a CEQA exemption, potentially leading to the loss of essential repopulation habitat without any environmental review, mitigation, or opportunity for public input.

Finally, the Legislature committed to reconsidering SB 131’s failure to provide an adequate procedure for tribal consultation on development projects covered by the bill.  Notably, SB 131 has several flaws that the Legislature did not commit to reconsider. For example, the bill imposes unreasonable limits on the documents included in the administrative records that courts rely on in CEQA cases. These revisions to CEQA's record preparation procedures empower public agencies to hide key evidence that could undermine the legality of their decisions, thus tilting the scales of justice against public participation and environmental protection.

Because it was adopted at the last minute, SB 131 has generated significant confusion. In particular, it was touted as a housing bill—a misleading characterization. A separate trailer bill, AB 130, was passed on the same day and included the largest housing exemption in CEQA’s history. AB 130 allows certain housing projects on sites up to 20 acres to bypass environmental review, without any requirements for affordability. SB 131, on the other hand, mostly does not address housing issues. Indeed, the bill includes exemptions for a range of non-housing projects, including advanced manufacturing. Yet after the bills passed, supporters often failed to distinguish SB 131 from AB 130, implying both bills addressed the state’s housing shortage. 

SB 131 was adopted through an undemocratic process that stretched constitutional restrictions beyond the breaking point. While it was adopted as a budget trailer bill, it does not relate to the budget. Furthermore, in an unprecedented move referred to as a “poison pill”, the Governor conditioned his approval of the budget on its adoption [10]. The Governor claimed it was “too important to play chance,” and that he did not want the “process to unfold in the traditional way” [11]. Critics called these legislative maneuvers a subversion of the typical democratic process. As co-author Douglas Carstens stated at the time, “If this was such a great idea, why did it have to be done in three days? This is the kind of stuff that would normally be debated” [12].

The California Constitution provides that “the budget bill and other bills providing for appropriations related to the budget bill may be passed in each house by rollcall vote…” (Cal. Const., Art. IV, §12(e)(1).) These “other bills,” known as budget trailer bills, “shall consist only of bills identified as related to the budget in the budget bill passed by the Legislature.” (Cal. Const., Art. IV, §12(e)(2).) However, SB 131 contains no appropriations and is not genuinely related to the budget. Accordingly, it should be considered unconstitutional.

Through legislative chicanery and intimidation tactics, the Legislature appears to have been stampeded into adopting unwise policy choices that a more deliberate process would have likely avoided. We continue to advocate for more balanced, thoughtful legislation [13]—that reflects the interests of all Californians, not just the special interests that benefited from fast-tracking SB 131. 

-

Douglas Carstens is a partner with Carstens, Black & Minteer, LLP (www.cbcearthlaw.com) and Chair of the Board of the Planning and Conservation League (https://pcl.org/)

Dan Silver is Executive Director of Endangered Habitats League (https://www.ehleague.org/), a Southern California organization dedicated to ecosystem protection and sustainable land use for the benefit of all the region’s inhabitants.

Aleja Maria Cretcher is a legal fellow and attorney at Communities for a Better Environment (https://www.cbecal.org/), an environmental justice organization working to build people’s power in California’s communities of color and low-income communities to achieve environmental health and justice.