Matt Mahan

Now, I do think

There's a big difference between wanting to build out in greenfield, open space, outside of a growth boundary.

If you want to build out in the valleys and the hills of California, that probably should take an environmental review process that is quite a bit more robust and takes more time than if you want to do infill development.

My big complaint has been even in our urbanized areas.

where we have roads and sewers, and we're talking about building on a surface parking lot or a place that is adjacent to a bunch of urbanized development, we will still take, at least up until very recently, on almost all projects, have taken over a year to go through environmental.

And our definition of environmental, just to be clear, with California's Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, is so much broader than what you might imagine is the environment.

It's not...

Clean air, clean water.

It goes far beyond that.

It is noise impacts, traffic impacts, shadows, historic registries, Native American remains in the ground.

I mean, just an endless list of potential impacts with a lot of discretion or debate over what are the right mitigations.

Yeah.

And I think we've got to simplify that.

Now, it's not to say we shouldn't check if you're destroying a historic building.

Sure, that's valid.

But it can't take as long as it does.

And this is where I actually think technology can be really helpful.

It ought to be.

be that we have inventoried things in advance and it doesn't take a year to do a one-off bespoke study where we have this cottage industry of consultants who make millions of dollars taking a year or more to study everything.

We ought to be able to run it against a database and say, okay, here's how many people are living here.