Suits alleging state’s greenhouse gas laws are racist heading toward trial next year

Is California’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions racist? That’s a novel claim in a pair of cases headed for trial next year that were filed by a group of advocates for minority and low-income housing who are challenging the state’s decade-old law to fight climate change.

The group’s attorneys appeared at a case management conference in Fresno on Wednesday.

The hearing was to determine a trial date for next year, said a spokesperson for the defendant California Air Resources Board. In statements last year, the agency denied its climate policies harm low-income and minority communities, and said emissions will go up if it loses the case.

According to a joint statement filed with the court on Nov. 13, the group and the state Department of Justice have been unable to reach a settlement and remain at odds over an extensive Public Records Act request filed by the plaintiffs in The Two Hundred v. California Air Resources Board, 18CEG01494 (Fresno Super. Ct., filed April 27, 2018).

The Two Hundred group bills itself as “an unincorporated association of civil rights leaders” in its court filings.

The Two Hundred is challenging the implementation of SB 375, a 2008 law designed to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions through greater planning and coordination among housing, transportation and land use agencies. These policies are making it harder for low-income Californians to rent or buy homes, preventing them from building wealth and creating longer commutes, the complaint stated.

It claims these plans violate numerous other state and federal laws, including the California Environmental Quality Act, the California Clean Air Act and the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. They are seeking to have portion’s of the agency’s Scoping Plan invalidated, including its Vehicle Miles Traveled Mandate and CO2 per capita targets for local climate action plans.

“High wealth households cause far more global GHG emissions than middle-class and poor households,” the complaint stated. “The Scoping Plan ignores this undisputed scientific fact and unfairly, and unlawfully, seeks to burden California’s minority and middle-class households in need of affordable housing with new regulatory costs and burdens that do not affect existing, wealthier homeowners who ‘already have theirs.’”

The group’s attorney, Jennifer L. Hernandez, is also a member of The Two Hundred’s leadership council. The partner with Holland & Knight LLP in San Francisco is also representing the organization in another case making similar claims, The Two Hundred v. California State Transportation Agency, 80003161 (Sac. Super. Ct., filed Nov. 27, 2018). She did not return a call seeking comment.

Reached Wednesday, The Two Hundred’s vice chair, John C. Gamboa, said the organization came into being when some veteran environmentalists began talking during the housing crisis. He was the former executive director of The Greenlining Institute, an Oakland-based organization that attempts to combat racial and economic inequality through environmental and housing policies, but he left about a decade ago.

“When I was running Greenlining, we wanted to get involved in seeing that we could address homeownership as a way of addressing the wealth gap of communities of color,” Gamboa said.

This effort led to the creation of the parent organization of The Two Hundred, California Community Builders. The leadership councils of the two groups are nearly identical, including both Hernandez, former Senate Pro Tem Don Perata and Chair Joe Coto, a former state assemblyman. Most are over 70, leading Gamboa to joke “We almost called ourselves the Graylining Institute.”

They set out to determine “what are the factors inhibiting homeownership,” Gamboa said. One culprit, he said, was some of California’s environmental laws.

“We quickly identified regulatory misuse, in particular CEQA, misuse by NIMBYs,” Gamboa said, using an acronym for “not in my backyard.”

He also noted The Two Hundred does not bill itself as an environmental group. It does support the wider goals of CEQA and many other environmental laws, he added, even though “some of them are misused and really hurt communities of color.”

Some representatives of environmental groups speaking on background said they are staying out of the fray. Meanwhile, some conservatives — for instance, the popular John and Ken radio show on KFI-AM 640 — have cheered the group’s court battles. The Two Hundred’s web page prominently features a link to a Jan. 9 column on the Fresno case by Susan Shelley, a conservative columnist for the Southern California News Group, which appears to express skepticism of man-made climate change. Her web page identifies her as vice president for communications for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

“In what may signal the beginning of the end of alarmism over climate change, a group of civil rights activists is suing the California Air Resources Board,” Shelley wrote.