California's Environmental Quality Act cleanup bill withdrawn, delaying fix to industrial exemptions

Chaewon Chung, The Sacramento Bee on Jan 12, 2026

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Environmental justice and conservation advocates’ push to advance a bill aimed at strengthening California’s Environmental Quality Act stalled, as the measure was pulled from Monday’s hearing agenda.

Assembly Bill 1083 would have rolled back some of the exemptions that the governor and the Legislature passed in June with Senate Bill 131. The exemptions to CEQA, a law that requires public agencies to identify and mitigate significant environmental impacts from their proposed projects, allowed “advanced manufacturing” projects to forgo environmental review.

“I introduced AB 1083 as a two-year bill at the end of last year’s legislative session to make sure the issue of SB 131 cleanup was front-and-center when we returned the following year … As we approached the new year, it became clear that we needed more time to continue conversations, and the Speaker has facilitated these discussions,” Assemblymember Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, said in a statement.

“We’ve introduced a new bill — AB 1553 — to allow for more time to craft effective cleanup legislation,” Connolly said, referring to a placeholder CEQA bill introduced on Friday that is expected to eventually carry whatever the negotiated cleanup language in place of AB 1083.

Raquel Mason, a senior legislative manager at California Environmental Justice Alliance, described AB 1083 is currently in “intent language,” without the detailed policy provisions that will ultimately spell out how lawmakers propose to fix SB 131’s CEQA rollbacks.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, said he has no specific concerns with the proposed bill itself, but that he wants more time to negotiate with the governor’s office and the Senate to reach a three-party agreement, said Jakob Evans, a senior policy strategist at Sierra Club.

Environmental justice and conservation advocates learned about the decision on Jan. 4, said Mason, adding the groups turned Monday into a day to lobby legislators to advocate for strong cleanup language after learning the bill was pulled.

“From an environmental justice perspective, this was the safeguards that we needed so that this exemption wasn’t going to create all these harms in our communities — it’s really disappointing to see the bill pulled, because we’re leaving ourselves open to so much more risk until we finally land something here,” Mason said.

The shot-down AB 1083 aimed at narrowing the advanced manufacturing exemption, restoring protections for endangered species habitat and public access to administrative records and securing public health safeguards for communities affected by exempt projects.

“Exempting manufacturing from environmental review is very different from exempting housing development,” said Asha Sharma, a state policy manager for Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, stressing that under CEQA, communities are entitled to notice and public hearings when facilities like data centers move in, along with access to basic information about water and energy use — protections she said have been wrongly vilified in the Legislature.

“A lot of these facilities that they exempted have long histories of contaminating drinking water and air, directly leading to harmful chronic diseases like asthma, cancer — what we’re talking about is a huge threat to public health.”

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