California Public Sector Union Threatens Environmental Lawsuit Over Gavin Newsom’s Return-to-Office Policy

California’s onerous and easily exploitable environmental review law is being pushed to new levels of absurdity by unionized state workers who are threatening to use it to block Gov. Gavin Newsom’s return-to-office mandate. 

Since early last year, Newsom’s administration has been in the process of winding down COVID-era telework arrangements for state workers. Earlier this month, the governor’s office issued memos to state agencies telling them to implement a four-day, in-office requirement by July 1. 

State employee unions have actively opposed Newsom’s return-to-office policies by filing unfair labor complaints with state regulators and agitating for legislative protections for telework arrangements. 

These efforts escalated Wednesday, when, as The Sacramento Bee reports, CASE, the union representing state-employed legal workers, issued letters to agencies claiming that their return-to-office policies had not undergone the necessary review required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

Requiring workers to return to the office “will require hundreds of thousands of additional monthly commutes by state workers, creating hundreds of thousands of new car trips and thousands of tons of additional air pollution from automobile tailpipes,” wrote CASE. 

Under CEQA, agencies must study those environmental impacts and consider alternatives, like continued telework, argued CASE in its letter. The union threatened to sue if this CEQA review was not performed. 

The notion that the governor can’t tell his employees to physically come into the office without completing a giant environmental study will only sound crazy to people who have not been following CEQA’s many controversies. 

In brief, the law requires government agencies to study the environmental impacts of discretionary projects they undertake and consider alternative projects that have lesser impacts on the environment. 

The law also empowers third parties to sue government agencies for undertaking projects without doing the necessary CEQA reviews. 

Because the range of government actions that can be considered a discretionary project under CEQA is vast, and CEQA lawsuits take a long time to resolve, the law has become a go-to tool for individuals and interest groups to block any policy or project they don’t like. 

CEQA is frequently used to delay the construction of housing, businesses, infrastructure, and more. 

The law is also used to extract concessions from project sponsors. Unions use it to force builders to use all-union labor. Rival developers and community groups use it to extract cash payments from project sponsors. 

Famously, petitioners in Berkeley temporarily managed to block student enrollment growth at the University of California campus there because the school hadn’t studied the noise impacts of additional students on surrounding neighborhoods. 

CEQA’s absurd results have led California policymakers to limit the scope of the law. 

Last year, the Legislature passed a law that excluded infill residential development from needing to undergo CEQA review. A Chamber of Commerce-backed ballot initiative that will likely be considered by voters in November would drastically limit the law’s requirements for most infrastructure and land development projects. 

Yet, it seems for every CEQA reform that’s passed, there’s another novel invocation of the law that expands its scope. 

No policy decision is too minor to avoid being turned into a book report and a court battle by a motivated special interest. 

CASE’s threatened litigation over Newsom’s return-to-office policy is just more evidence of how badly out of control CEQA has gotten.