Calif. Senate advances industrial safeguards bill after Garden Grove evacuation

The California State Senate voted 22-10 to advance SB954, legislation that would restore environmental review requirements for advanced manufacturing facilities near residential communities, following a chemical plant emergency that sent roughly 50,000 Garden Grove residents fleeing during a holiday weekend.

The bill, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, would reverse sweeping exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act granted to advanced manufacturing operations under last year's SB131 — a law that allowed the Garden Grove plant to be built without residents' knowledge or any public disclosure.

The Garden Grove incident laid bare what critics call a dangerous gap in state law: under the framework established by last year's SB131, industrial facilities — including chemical plants — can be sited, permitted and built with no environmental review and no obligation to notify neighboring homes, schools, hospitals or first responders, Voice of OC reported. The plant that triggered the evacuation had been unknown to nearby residents before the emergency.

Blakespear, who represents Northern San Diego and South Orange County, said she planned to invoke the incident directly on the Senate floor. "I plan to bring up Garden Grove on the floor of the Senate when I bring up the bill. It's an example of what can go wrong. We want to make sure our communities are protected," she told Voice of OC just before the session.

SB954 would require advanced manufacturing operations within 1,000 feet of a disadvantaged community to undergo CEQA review before construction. "SB 954 clarifies the intent of the legislature to refine what advanced manufacturing should be granted a CEQA exemption, and it adds important environmental guardrails, including that advanced manufacturing within a thousand feet of a disadvantaged community must go through CEQA," Blakespear said during an April debate in the Senate Standing Committee on Environmental Quality, according to Voice of OC.

Republicans framed the measure as a bid to relitigate last year's debate. State Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, vice chair of the environmental quality committee, said in a Republican caucus press release that "last year's reform was clearly intended to expedite, to develop and grow industry and the jobs that come with it," and that under SB954 "Californians will be the losers because there will be fewer job-creating projects and the 'winning' ones will be larded up with costly concessions to powerful special interests."

Deja McCauley, land use and health program manager for Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, said the challenge lies in reconciling competing priorities. "How can we build safely and in a way that works for people that need jobs and industries but also protects people that live close to those industries," McCauley told Voice of OC.

Under California's current law, Voice of OC reported, neighbors, schools, hospitals and first responders have no legal right to be notified before an industrial facility is permitted in their community — a gap the Garden Grove evacuation made undeniable for 50,000 Orange County residents.