Prop 45 Creates a Corporate Loophole to Fast-Track Gas Pipelines, Data Centers and More

Oil and gas companies, for-profit utilities and data center developers are spending millions to limit oversight and public input

Sponsored by No on Prop 45

By No on Prop 45

The corporations behind Proposition 45 say it simply “expedites environmental review for certain projects.” It may sound harmless, but the truth is that corporations funding this ballot measure don’t want to disclose their other projects.

Buried deep in the 41 pages of Prop 45, is a definition of “certain projects” serving as a massive loophole. This would let corporate developers fast-track dangerous gas pipelines, industrial facilities that emit toxic chemicals and giant data centers, near homes, daycares and schools, with less oversight and less say for the people who have to live next to them.

The timing is no accident. President Trump has spent the last two years rolling back the clean air and clean water protections Californians spent fifty years winning. Now oil and gas companies, for-profit utilities and data center developers are following his lead, spending tens of millions of dollars to weaken California’s own safeguards. Their motivation has more to do with their profits than Californians’ cost of living.

Public health advocates are sounding the alarm about what that means for public health. “The American Lung Association is calling on Californians to reject Proposition 45 because it undermines clean air protections,” said Will Barrett, the Lung Association’s Assistant Vice President of Nationwide Policy, Clean Air. “At a time when our air quality is at grave risk to federal clean air rollbacks, attacks on California’s Clean Air Act authority and legislation to weaken clean air protections, Proposition 45 would invite even more pollution into California neighborhoods.”

Consider what is at stake. Developers recently proposed installing dozens of diesel generators next to a daycare for little kids, a recipe for a lifetime of asthma and heart disease. Under today’s law, communities can demand answers and safeguards before anyone breaks ground. Under Prop 45, projects like these get fast-tracked, with less review, less oversight and fewer questions asked. For families living near freeways, warehouses and industrial sites, environmental review is often the only defense against more pollution.

And when oversight fails, Californians pay. Southeast Los Angeles is still living with the aftermath of the Exide battery plant: lead in front yards, toxic chemicals in air and water and taxpayers on the hook for a cleanup that has passed $750 million and still isn’t finished. Prop 45’s answer to that history is less oversight, not more.

Its backers want you to believe this is about the cost of living. Yet nowhere in the measure’s 41 pages is there a requirement that lowers a rent payment, a mortgage or a utility bill, or one that says the savings the corporations will pocket must ever reach California residents. What the fine print does deliver is data centers that drain local water supplies and strain the electrical grid, with residential customers picking up the tab. The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst has already estimated that Prop 45 could cost taxpayers more than $100 million a year to implement. Prop 45 doesn’t lower costs. It moves them, from the polluters to the people.

It also rewrites who holds the power. “Prop. 45 essentially shifts power from the public agencies charged with overseeing these projects to the industrial developers backing them,” said Mabel Tsang, with the California Environmental Justice Alliance. Prop 45 flips the power to the industrial developers themselves and even hands them a new right to sue cities and counties that try to impose commonsense conditions.

Californians should decide what gets built next to their home, their kids’ school, their water supply. Prop 45 instead gives that decision to the corporations that wrote the measure.

That’s why more than 350 local, state and national organizations are opposed to Proposition 45, including the American Lung Association, the California Professional Firefighters, the National Wildlife Federation and the Coalition for Clean Air, along with hundreds of health, labor, conservation and community groups. They don’t agree on everything, but they do agree on this: Polluters don’t need more help getting around the rules.

Stop the corporate polluters, keep Trump’s toxic agenda out of California and vote No on Prop 45.

Ad paid for by No on Prop 45, sponsored by labor, health and environmental organizations. Ad Committee’s Top Funders: Clean and Healthy California, Sponsored by Environmental Organizations; Wendy Schmidt; State Building & Construction Trades Council of California.