Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘California’

California’s CEQA, cont’d

Following up on last week’s post, Gideon Kanner calls our attention to this summer’s case of Clover Valley Foundation v. City of Rocklin. As Prof. Kanner wrote at the time in the L.A. Daily Journal:

This was a lawsuit challenging a housing project on environmental grounds some 30 years after the subject property was zoned for housing development, 20 years after the developer’s request for a permit, and after 10 years of planning and environmental review, plus a nearly one-half reduction in the number of permitted dwellings, a five-fold increase in open space, and after millions of dollars were exacted for in-lieu payments. The city approved the project in 2007.

Then the NIMBYs attacked in court. To its credit, the court in effect said “enough already” and rejected the NIMBY challenge. But the court also said that this was a case in which environmental laws “worked.” I would hate to see what it would take for their Lordships to acknowledge a case in which those laws didn’t work.

For more of a flavor of the Clover Valley case, see the write-up from the Meyers Nave law firm.

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California’s sclerotic CEQA

As Gideon Kanner points out, you don’t need to be a property rights advocate to see the California Environmental Quality Act as a lawsuit-intensive mess (quoting Prof. Robert Freilich):

Many attorneys, planners, architects, engineers, scientists, developers, small businesses, business associations and governments in the state, and many environmentalists are agreed that CEQA needs major reform. Delays in the system are causing projects to suffer delays of 2 to 9 years to get EIRs approved, especially for (but not limited to) the failure to compare the project with all “feasible” alternatives, establish vague baseline analysis for existing mitigation, and the tricky determination as to which parts of regional, general and specific plan EIR findings can be incorporated, to eliminate duplication of effort and cost. The law is so confused on these points that it is a miracle that any EIR can survive its first round in the courts without a remand to do it over again. Complicating this result is the establishment of a specialized group of attorneys that initiate litigation at the drop of a hat, primarily because the statute authorizes attorney’s fees for any remand or reversal. Many community associations and no growth environmentalists use the EIR litigation process to delay and in many cases kill projects for little or no environmental substance.

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Calif. bill proposes work rules, meal breaks for babysitters

The bill would also require employers of babysitters, i.e. parents, to prepare extensive paperwork and keep it on file for at least three years after a wage payment. Some critics say the obligation to provide periodic breaks would require families to hire a second sitter to relieve the first. Homeowners would be required to permit all-day domestic workers to prepare their own food in the family kitchen and would be forbidden to object to the workers’ choice of food. AB 889, sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-S.F.) and grandly labeled the “Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights,” has passed the lower house in Sacramento and will now be considered by the Senate. [NBC Los Angeles, Matt Welch, Sen. Doug LaMalfa, earlier] Last year New York made itself the first state to extend general workplace regulation to domestic employment.

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California: “Lawmakers kill fix for disability access suits”

Democrats in Sacramento are unswayed by continuing reports that Unruh Act complaint mills are extracting millions from the state’s small businesses on accessibility claims, and throttle a bill that would require notice and a chance to fix problems before suing. [Legal Pad, The Recorder, CJAC] Opponents of the fix include the trial-lawyers’ lobby, Consumer Attorneys of California. Background here; the perennially doomed equivalent bill in the U.S. Congress is discussed here. I discussed the issue on the John Stossel show last year.

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July 6 roundup

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California closes a yogurt business

No wonder it had to go:

Her business, while it lasted, consisted of herself, making yogurt on the instructions of her father. Ms Dashtaki was renting space in the kitchen of an Egyptian restaurant where she and her father, “like elves before and after their working hours”, lovingly cultured their yogurt under a blanket, then drained it through a certain kind of cheese cloth, then stirred it for hours, and so forth. For the taste to be divine, everything has to be just so. And, being artisans, they kept the volume tiny, about 20 gallons (76 litres) a week, for sale only at local farmers’ markets.

Homa Dashtaki was eager to demonstrate that her yogurt was safe and healthful, but complying with California regulations turned out to be not so easy. In fact, authorities told her that she would face possible prosecution unless she established a “Grade A dairy facility” employing processes more commonly found in factories. A highlight: she’d have to install a pasteurizer even though she made her yogurt from milk that was already pasteurized. What’s more, California law makes it illegal to pasteurize milk twice, so there went any hope of continuing her straightforward way of obtaining milk, namely bringing it home from a fancy grocery store.

Ms Dashtaki is pondering whether to move to another state, one whose rules allow for artisanal products. She would not be the first entrepreneur to flee the Golden State.

Although a small artisan cheese sector struggles to get by, the California dairy market generally is dominated by mass-market producers selling blandly standardized wares. And you can see how that winds up happening. [The Economist]

More: Coyote. And more on the California regulatory climate from Ted at PoL, including a link to Cal-Peculiarities (PDF), by David Kadue of Seyfarth Shaw, on the state’s distinctively onerous employment laws.

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