California Environmental Quality Act: record of proceedings.

(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. 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. CEQA establishes a procedure for the preparation and certification of the record of proceedings upon the filing of an action or proceeding challenging a lead agency's action on the grounds of noncompliance with CEQA. This bill would require the lead agency, at the request of a project applicant and consent of the lead agency, to prepare a record of proceedings concurrently with the preparation of a negative declaration, mitigated negative declaration, EIR, or other environmental document for projects. (2) CEQA requires the lead agency to submit to the State Clearinghouse a sufficient number of copies of specified environmental documents prepared pursuant to CEQA for review and comment by state agencies in certain circumstances and a copy of those documents in electronic form, as prescribed. CEQA requires the Office of Planning and Research to implement, utilizing existing resources, a public assistance program to, among other things, establish and maintain a database to assist in the preparation of environmental documents, establish and maintain a central repository for the collection, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of certain notices provided to the office, and provide to the California State Library copies of documents submitted in electronic format to the office pursuant to CEQA. This bill would require a lead agency to submit to the State Clearinghouse those environmental documents in either a hard-copy or electronic form as prescribed by the office. The bill would instead require the office to establish and maintain a database for the collection, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of environmental documents and notices prepared pursuant to CEQA and to make the database available online to the public. The bill would eliminate the requirement to provide copies of documents to the California State Library. The bill would require the office to submit to the Legislature a report, by July 1, 2017, describing the implementation of this requirement and a status report, by July 1, 2019.