Environment: California Environmental Quality Act: overriding consideration.

(1) The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires a lead agency, as defined, to prepare, or cause to be prepared, and certify the completion of, an environmental impact report (EIR) on a project that it proposes to carry out or approve that may have a significant effect on the environment or to adopt a negative declaration if it finds that the project will not have that effect. The CEQA also requires a lead agency to prepare a mitigated negative declaration for a project that may have a significant effect on the environment if revisions in the project would avoid or mitigate that effect and there is no substantial evidence that the project, as revised, would have a significant effect on the environment. For projects whose environmental impacts can not be mitigated to less than significance, existing law authorizes a lead agency to find that specified overriding economic, legal, social, technological, or other benefits of the project outweigh the significant effects on the environment. If an EIR has been prepared and certified for a program, plan, policy, or ordinance, a lead agency is required to use a tiered EIR for a later project if the lead agency determines that the later project is consistent with the program, plan, policy, or ordinance, and satisfies other criteria. This bill would authorize a lead agency, until January 1, 2016, to incorporate by reference a finding of overriding consideration made in a prior EIR for a later project if specified conditions are met, including that the lead agency determines that the later project's significant impacts on the environment are not greater than or different from those identified in the prior EIR. (2) This bill would incorporate additional changes to Section 21094 of the Public Resources Code proposed by this bill and SB 1456, to be operative only if this bill and SB 1456 are both enacted and become effective on or before January 1, 2011, and this bill is enacted last. (3) This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as an urgency statute.