By Hank Shaw,
Capitol Bureau Chief
Thursday, February 16, 2006
SACRAMENTO - Three Central Valley lawmakers unveiled flood-control bills Wednesday as part of a larger rollout of public works legislation sponsored by Assembly Republicans.
Stockton's Greg Aghazarian, Fresno's Mike Villines and Richvale's Doug LaMalfa are carrying the legislation, all of which would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for levee repairs.
Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakers-field said the proposals, along with others to streamline road-building projects and protect highway money, represent their stance in the larger debate over public works that is dominating discussion at the Capitol.
Suspending CEQA, as the act is known, strips layers of bureaucratic red tape away from routine levee repair projects, Aghazarian and others say. Do this, and the dollars Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature are asking voters to spend will go farther.
"We are looking to do something in California other than buy new studies,"
McCarthy said.
But levee engineers who actually do the fixing say the real hindrance to their efforts isn't CEQA, it's the federal Endangered Species Act.
"The biggest, No. 1 problem is clearly ESA," said Joe Countryman of MBK Engineers, a firm that performs levee work in the Delta. "CEQA is much less onerous."
Bill Darsie of Stockton-based Kjeldsen, Sinnock & Neudeck agreed. "CEQA really isn't the problem. The problem is ESA."
To be sure, while Darsie says he's never seen it happen with levee work, the potential for problems does exist with CEQA. Should a group take umbrage with a maintenance project, it could use the law as a weapon to stop the project.
"There are times when provisions of CEQA can be untenable," he said.
Aghazarian, who's sponsoring the bill to suspend CEQA for routine levee maintenance, said his proposal would eliminate that potential.
"If CEQA's not the problem, let's put this in the code so it doesn't become a problem," Aghazarian said. "Why not do this if it has the potential to save someone's property or life?"
Villines' proposal would allow the governor to declare a state of emergency to repair levees determined by either the Army Corps of Engineers or the state Department of Water Resources to be an imminent flood threat.
Several such sites already have been identified in the Delta along the Sacramento River.
LaMalfa's bill would eliminate an existing requirement for levee repair crews to maintain the same amount of natural habitat they found before they did the repairs.
Countryman said his work in the Delta faces this problem, but it's easily dealt with because new habitat springs up in unused corners of the Delta islands all the time.
Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Fabian Nûñez, panned the ideas.
"In a nutshell, these Assembly Republican bills roll back state environmental laws in the guise of flood protection," Maviglio said.
Aghazarian countered by noting that existing law exempted CEQA provisions for Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, the BART route in the East Bay and even for potential Olympic construction in California.
"A lot of these make perfect sense, but we should at least have these same protections for our levees," he said.
McCarthy said their public works package is a starting point; he knows it will not survive the greater public works debate intact.
"What we're trying to do is bring solutions," he said. "We want to bring something to the table."
Aghazarian's bill is AB2026; Villines' bill is AB2029; LaMalfa's bill is AB2027.
Contact Capitol Bureau Chief Hank Shaw at (916) 441-4078 or sacto@recordnet.com