CalChamber pushes ballot measure aimed at speeding housing projects; would make ‘substantive change’ to CEQA
February 24, 2026
By Emily Hamann
The head of the California Chamber of Commerce gave details about the group’s ballot initiative to reform California’s environmental review law.
CalChamber CEO Jennifer Barrera spoke about the ballot measure on a panel during a conference on housing held Tuesday and put on by Capitol Weekly and the University of California Student and Policy Center.
“Affordability, with regard to housing, is one of the key issues that I hear about from my members,” Barrera said. “Not just those who are the builders or the developers, but really employers in California who are struggling to maintain or attract a workforce here in California because the cost of housing is too high.”
At the beginning of this month, CalChamber announced that it had collected 25% of the signatures it needs to qualify for the ballot.
“We are very optimistic that we will get it qualified,” Barrera said.
If it does qualify, CalChamber has the option to try to negotiate with the Legislature to pass the policy as a bill instead of putting it on the ballot. However, Barrera said that it is not likely to be CalChamber’s strategy.
“When you go through the Legislature,” she said. “There is a tendency for things to get whittled down.”
Barrera said the initiative would create deadlines for local agencies to complete environmental reviews and decide whether to approve certain types of projects. It would also create deadlines for courts to decide litigation over environmental review.
“We don’t tell the local jurisdictions how they have to decide what their land-use decisions need to be. We don’t completely eliminate environmental review,” she said. “We just say that there have to be enforceable deadlines within the approval process.”
She said that would add certainty for builders and investors and should speed up the timeline for building projects.
“Time is money,” she said. “For years, while these projects languish between agencies and in between decision makers, those costs continue to go up. The building material costs go up. The labor costs go up. And those are ultimately costs that are born on to the consumers.”
Dan Dunmoyer, CEO of the California Building Industry Association, agreed that those delays can multiply the cost of a project.
“When you can delay, it’s a great tool for NIMBYs, and it destroys housing,” he said.
Chris Elmendorf, a professor of housing and land-use law at UC Davis, said the initiative makes a “substantive change” to the California Environmental Quality Act.
He said that the current review of a project under CEQA is open-ended, to study any possible environmental effects of a project on a case-by-case basis.
“The approach of the CEQA ballot measure is instead to turn CEQA into kind of like a checklist for other existing environmental laws that have objective standards,” Elmendorf said, “and if the project complies with those objective standards, then it’s good to go.”
He also said that the initiative would grandfather-in a broad range of infrastructure projects so that they must only comply with regulations that are in place when developers submit their preliminary application for the project. That policy is already in place for housing projects — the initiative would expand that to other types of projects, including transportation, energy and water projects.
During a separate discussion later in the day, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of the Assembly’s fiercest housing reformers, said she supported CalChamber’s ballot measure.
“We have, on CEQA, beyond housing too, climate resiliency projects getting caught up in litigation and lawsuits,” Wicks said. “We can’t build enough renewable energy projects because of the permitting process.”
She mentioned a hearing in which she heard from one Southern California solar company that spent 12 years — preparing a 1,100-page environmental review and getting 72 permits from 28 different agencies — to build one transmission line.
“We say we have these climate goals, and yet we make it almost impossible to reach them,” she said.
She called the ballot measure the “next iteration” of the work the Legislature has done to streamline housing permitting.
“We have to build for the modern era,” she said.
Have questions? Contact Emily Hamann at ehamann@stateaffairs.com or on X @emilychamann.