By admin 
Going into the summer, it appeared the groups behind Proposition 45 were prepared to spend heavily to sell their message that affordability for Californians was best achieved through streamlining environmental permitting for a range of building projects.
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And the measure seemed poised to tap into voter sentiment. Around 73% of likely voters told pollsters from the Public Policy Institute of California in June they supported modifying environmental reviews for housing, transportation, health, water and clean energy projects. Though PPIC noted the label and title Proposition 45 carried on the ballot weren’t yet published.
The ballot measure’s supporters included well-heeled groups such as the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Building Industry Association and a political action committee funded by Google founder Sergey Brin and other tech titans.
But by the time votes were counted this month, it was the opposition — fueled in part by $10 million in donations from Wendy Schmidt, a staunch backer of environmental causes and the wife of another Google titan, former CEO Eric Schmidt — who spent more on advertising.
Prop. 45 proponents say the campaign raised less money than it needed to compete, and that after spending $15 million on drafting and signature gathering to get the measure on the ballot, they were outgunned to the tune of $13 million by the No campaign’s coffers. On Monday, Politico reported that in the final months of the campaign the No side outspent their opponents on advertising by about $7 million, citing data from the company AdImpact.
But money was just part of the story. Prop. 45 ran into ever-mounting opposition as the summer wore on, with the coalition against it growing to include a wide swath of environmental, public health and organized labor groups, including, much to the chagrin of the measure’s backers, the building trades.
That broad opposition and the well-funded advertising campaign appears to have translated to vanishing support for the measure from voters. As ballots continue being counted, more than 56% of voters had rejected the measure as of Tuesday, leading the Yes vote by nearly 12.5 percentage points, or more than 1.3 million ballots. The Associated Press declared the measure defeated on Saturday. Though opposition came from some surprising corners, such as a set of county-level Republican parties, it largely centered around the notion that Prop. 45 went too far in rolling back environmental protections and would be too difficult to correct once voters passed it.
In the wake of that win, the measure’s architects are accusing the opposition of pushing a misleading message about its impacts, particularly around the construction of unpopular data centers. But for those that opposed the ballot measure, the win engendered both a sigh of relief and optimism that perhaps voters value the California Environmental Quality Act more than recent debate among policymakers in Sacramento would let on.
“It would have been the biggest rollback to environmental protections that California has seen,” said Aruna Prabhala, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “And it’s also coming at a time of affordability crisis, and people are thinking about how do we make you know California more livable for everyone, and so I know that there’s an appetite for big new ideas.”
The message to the incoming state Legislature, which appears likely to have an even-larger Democratic majority than before, and to Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, is that any CEQA reform to lower housing costs needs to be thoughtful, according to Prabhala.
“How do we address affordability without sacrificing clean air, clean water in our communities?” she said. “How do we look at other pieces of our regulatory framework in California to address (the cost of living)?”
Prop. 45’s architects have a very different takeaway as the election ends.
“If that’s the message that anyone takes, that’s certainly the wrong way to interpret the results, because in no way do I think that the voters were worried about necessarily the elimination of the environmental protections, because Prop. 45 didn’t do that,” said Jennifer Barrera, president of the California Chamber of Commerce. The vote, she said, “was a result of some of the misinformation that was put out by the opposition.”
The clash over data centers
Much of the No campaign’s spending went to ads that featured smoke stacks and focused heavily on the possibility of data centers taking advantage of the proposed streamline approval process. The measures proponents say data centers would not have been covered under the measure, a back and forth that dominated public debates and news coverage throughout the campaign season.
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“If we had had a conversation with the voters about whether we should trade speed for cost savings, and the voters had voted against Proposition 45, you know, it’s a fair fight,” Jason Elliot, a consultant who helped design Prop. 45 and a former member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, said. “But the data center thing, (the opposition) knew that it was a lie, and they used it anyway. And frankly, good campaign tactics.”
Both sides maintain their position on data centers’ inclusion in the measure now that the votes have been counted. Both sides have the conclusions of a number of legal experts they can point to, including, in the campaigns final months, dueling memos from the California Office of Legislative Counsel, the state attorneys that advise lawmakers. Strategists with both sides also agree that the inclusion of data centers influenced the vote on Prop. 45, as voters around the country passed moratoriums against their construction and elected politicians who promised to crackdown on the structures and the artificial intelligence industry they support
“It absolutely made a difference, and that’s what’s most frustrating about it,” Elliot said. “It’s the most specious argument they could have made.”
Data centers were just one of several projects proponents left room for in their designation of what projects would be considered essential, Little said, but were one that grabbed voters’ attention.
“We stand by our analysis that they can be covered, and that broke through,” he said. “I think that resonated with people as one of many types of dangerous projects that were covered within these nice sounding categories.”
Prabhala said opponents first became convinced the measure could cover data centers from an analysis published in late June by a University of California, Berkeley law professor who wasn’t associated with the campaign. But she noted that the measure’s language might also have included the construction of dams, projects with immense ecosystem impacts, by streamlining CEQA for water infrastructure.
A broad measure drove broad opposition
As the coalition grew, some of the state’s affordable housing organizations started to come out against Prop. 45, while others supported it. Still others, like the prominent organization YIMBY Action, stayed neutral. Much of the debate over the measure’s impacts on housing centered on where new homes might be built. Some advocates feared it would spur too much sprawl that expands developments into what is today open space. With a 41-page ballot measure that dived deep into permitting law, No campaign members say voters would have looked to who was backing or opposing the measure.
“The breadth of our coalition was really powerful,” Prabhala said. “It was from the (trade) unions, but also firefighters and nurses, and environment groups and justice groups coming together and saying, ‘This is too far. This is radical.’ And housing advocate groups coming out and saying ‘this is too far.’”
With the state’s most prominent labor unions, and the California Democratic Party, in opposition, some elected Democratic officials who have vocally supported CEQA reform stayed on the sidelines of the ballot fight. In the midst of the campaign, Gov. Gavin Newsom decried the “weaponization” of the environmental law and said permitting needed to be accelerated and “you’ve got to just move things,” in public remarks that dovetailed with much of the Yes on 45 campaign’s rhetoric. And yet Prop. 45 was one of just two measures on this year’s ballot that he declined to take a side on.
Limiting the number of projects included or trimming back some of the proposals to speed permitting might have kicked up less dust. But in drafting the measure, the Yes campaign chose to go big in its bid to voters.
“There were ways that we could have nibbled around the edges of CEQA and that would not have been a challenging uphill climb. But it also wouldn’t have accomplished the purpose,” Elliot said. “The purpose of what became Prop. 45 was to do what legislators and governors for decades have not been able to do.”
It remains to be seen what comes next in the long-running debate over CEQA’s protections against the needs of the state, particularly when it comes to housing construction. In interviews, supporters of Prop. 45 said they were reassessing the landscape, while opponents were celebrating their win. Neither side offered a clear suggestion for what comes next.
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