The Legislature hereby finds and declares all of the following:
(a) California’s environmental protection programs have established strict standards to reduce pollution and protect the public health and safety and the environment. The single purpose programs instituted to achieve these standards have been among the most successful efforts in the world, and have produced significant gains in protecting California’s environment in the face of substantial population growth.
(b) Continued progress to achieve the environmental standards in face of continued population growth will require greater coordination between the single purpose environmental programs and more efficient operation of these programs overall. Pollution must be prevented and controlled and not simply transferred to another media or another place. This goal can only be achieved by maintaining the current environmental protection standards and by greater integration of the existing programs.
(c) As the number of environmental laws and regulations have grown in California, so have the number of permits required of business and government. This regulatory burden has significantly added to the cost and time needed to obtain essential operating permits in California. The increasing number of individual permits and permit authorities has generated the continuing potential for conflict, overlap, and duplication between the various state, local, and federal environmental permits.
(d) To ensure that local needs and environmental conditions receive the proper attention, the issuance of environmental permits should continue to be made, to the extent feasible, at the regional and local levels of the environmental programs. To establish the framework for coordination among the regional offices of the environmental protection programs, consistency in regional boundaries should be achieved to the maximum extent practicable.
(e) The purpose of this division is to require the Secretary for Environmental Protection to institute new, efficient procedures which will assist businesses and public agencies in complying with the environmental quality laws in an expedited fashion, without reducing protection of public health and safety and the environment.
(f) Those procedures need to provide a permit process that promotes effective dialogue and ensures ease in the transfer and clarification of technical information, while preventing duplication. It is necessary that the procedures establish a process for preliminary and ongoing meetings between the applicant, the consolidated permit agency, and the participating permit agencies, but do not preclude the applicant or participating permit agencies from individually coordinating with each other.
(g) It is necessary, to the maximum extent practicable, that the procedures established in this division ensure that the consolidated permit agency process and applicable permit requirements and criteria are integrated and run concurrently, rather than consecutively.
(Added by Stats. 1993, Ch. 419, Sec. 5. Effective January 1, 1994.)
Last modified: October 25, 2018