Editorial | By The Editorial Board
Top photo: Bixby Creek Bridge on the Big Sur coast. Photo: Diliff / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
In 1970, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act. Its premise was modest and, at the time, radical: before government lets something be built, it must look hard at the damage, tell the public what it found, and ask whether there is a better way. For more than half a century, that plain duty has stood between Californians and some of the worst ideas anyone ever had for our coast, our rivers and our neighborhoods.
Proposition 45 would hollow it out. Voters should reject it.
The measure, written by the California Chamber of Commerce, wears a mild ballot title and a sales pitch about affordability. Read the fine print and something far colder emerges.
For any project it labels “essential,” Prop. 45 caps the public’s time to comment on a draft environmental impact report at 45 days, and on a negative declaration at 20. No agency may extend those windows. Comments that arrive outside them, the text says, “shall be disregarded and excluded from the administrative record.” The objections of a neighbor who learns too late that a project is coming to her block would, in law, simply cease to exist.
It gets worse. Today an agency must weigh a range of alternatives that might do less harm. Under Prop. 45, the developer may offer a single alternative of its own design, and every other is declared “unnecessary.” Environmental standards would be frozen on the day the application was filed. Courts would be confined to whether an approval complied with “objective existing laws,” and could halt only the defective piece of a project, never the whole. Tribal consultation would be limited to federally recognized tribes, shutting out California Native peoples Washington has never recognized, among them the Muwekma Ohlone of this very Bay Area. And the measure orders that it be read to give “the fullest possible weight” to getting these projects approved.
Then there are the data centers.
Prop. 45 never uses the words. It doesn’t have to. Among its “essential” categories is broadband Internet access, defined to include “any capabilities that are incidental to and enable” Internet service, and every essential project swallows “all related and ancillary” infrastructure listed as part of “the whole of the project.” UC Berkeley law professor Eric Biber, asking whether data centers would be covered, concluded: “I think the answer is likely yes.” The drafters excluded high-speed rail and the Delta tunnel by name. They did not exclude data centers.
The Yes campaign points to a memo from the Legislature’s lawyers. But as The Sacramento Bee reported, that memo examined a definition in existing law and does not mention Prop. 45 at all. The measure’s official proponent, Kurt Oneto, has written that if a data center developer tried to use the law, he would argue in court that it isn’t covered. A promise to fight it out in court later is not a protection; it is an admission that the question would end up there. One sentence of exclusion would have settled it.
This matters in a state where a dry year is never more than one winter away and power bills are already among the steepest in the nation. Server farms devour electricity, and many designs drink water to stay cool. The communities asked to host them deserve every day of scrutiny the law now gives them, not a stopwatch and a closed comment box.
Follow the money. As of mid-October, supporters had raised about $45.3 million to opponents’ $30.1 million, according to CalMatters. Politico reports that PG&E, Edison International and Sempra have put in more than $7 million combined, and that California Resources Corp., the state’s largest oil driller, gave $1 million. Big homebuilders and the realtors’ lobby have poured in millions more. The measure’s “clean energy” category even covers capturing and storing carbon from oil refineries.
The proponents’ best argument deserves a straight answer: California really does take too long to build, and CEQA has been abused by litigants chasing leverage rather than clean air. That is true. It is also why, in June 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 130 and SB 131, exempting most urban infill housing from CEQA: targeted repairs by elected lawmakers who can revisit them. Prop. 45 is the opposite, a sweeping initiative the Legislature could amend only by a two-thirds vote, and only in ways that “further its purposes.” Its mistakes would be locked in.
The Yes side insists Prop. 45 “does not exempt a single project from environmental review.” Technically, no. It leaves the review standing and strips out the public, the alternatives and the courts that give review its teeth. And as opponents note, nothing in it requires a single rent, mortgage or utility bill to fall. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst, meanwhile, projects initial government costs likely in the high tens of millions of dollars a year, potentially topping $100 million.
That is why an extraordinary coalition stands against it: the State Building and Construction Trades Council alongside the Sierra Club, nurses and firefighters, the League of Women Voters and the California Democratic Party. The public is catching on, too. The Public Policy Institute of California found 73 percent of likely voters favoring the idea in July, before the official ballot language existed. By September, title and summary in hand, it was 49 percent yes, 46 percent no.
The redwoods, the Delta, the coast from Crescent City to Imperial Beach and the neighborhoods that have always borne the heaviest industry have not survived this long by accident. They have had a law on their side, one that lets ordinary people see what is coming and say so. Don’t trade that away for a slogan.
Vote No on Proposition 45.
