Newsom signs bills rolling back Reagan's landmark 1970 California environmental law

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law two bills that roll back former GOP Gov. Ronald Reagan's landmark 1970 California environmental law, which has since made building and housing projects costly.

Newsom signed the bills on Monday that will allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and possibly the lawsuits that delay construction and increase costs, The New York Times reported.

The new laws roll back the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970 (CEQA), which allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth and gave disaffected parties a tool to stop projects they found objectionable.

One bill will exempt high-density projects from CEQA if they are not on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites. 

The other includes changes that aim at expediting the legal review and will exempt numerous types of development projects, from farmworker housing to child care centers. Rezoning areas will also be easier for more housing in some cities.

While Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken CEQA, they realized that the state's bureaucratic obstacles made it nearly impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and homelessness. 

Republicans, meanwhile, have long claimed that CEQA was bad for the state's business climate.

“If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust, and that’s just the truth,” Newsom said in a news conference. “And so this is so much bigger in many ways than the issue itself. It is about the reputation of not just Sacramento and the legislative leadership and executive leadership, but the reputation of the state of California.”

Newsom had threatened to veto the state budget unless legislators rolled back CEQA.

The 1970 law required extensive review and public disclosure of potential environmental ramifications, and was viewed as the strictest measure of its kind in the U.S.

Reagan, who later became president, had signed CEQA into law when state leaders agreed that it was necessary to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources from pollution caused by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion, and suburban sprawl.

However, even some environmentalists have said that CEQA was a good law that resulted in unintended consequences. While the law initially was supposed to apply principally to government projects, a 1972 court decision expanded it to include many private projects, as well.