When Environmental Law Becomes a Business: CEQA Abuse in California’s Inland Regions
California’s environmental review process was designed to give communities a voice in decisions that affect their air, water, and land. In the decades since CEQA’s passage, it has become something additional: a revenue source for organizations that have learned to extract settlement payments from developers by threatening CEQA litigation regardless of the project’s actual environmental profile.
This is not a theoretical problem. It is documented, named — “greenmail” in the development industry — and increasingly recognized as a systemic dysfunction in California’s land use process. The state legislature has made multiple attempts to reform CEQA to reduce its abuse potential. Each attempt has encountered resistance from the organizations that benefit from the status quo.
In Imperial Valley, where the stakes are high and the documented demands are large, the CEQA greenmail problem is not abstract. It is the $83 million demand that CTR received from CCV. It is the manufactured CEQA exposure that the IVDC federal lawsuit alleges was coordinated specifically to create financial leverage. It is the litigation tax on investment that falls ultimately on the workers who would have been hired by projects that chose to build elsewhere.
How the Abuse Pattern Works in Practice
Step one: identify a discretionary approval — a project that required a government agency to exercise judgment. CEQA applies to discretionary approvals. Step two: file a CEQA challenge, or threaten one. The challenge does not need to be legally strong. It needs to be credible enough that the developer’s attorneys advise taking the litigation risk seriously. Step three: approach the developer for a settlement. Frame the payment as a “community benefit agreement” or a “mitigation fund.” Make the number large enough to generate organizational revenue but small enough that it costs the developer less than continued litigation.
The environmental review is not the point. The settlement is the point. Organizations that operate this model typically file the same pattern of objections against multiple projects in the same cycle, negotiating settlements with each developer separately. The cumulative revenue can be substantial. The cumulative deterrent effect on investment can be severe.
What Makes This Different From Legitimate Advocacy
Legitimate environmental advocacy uses legal tools to achieve environmental outcomes. A lawsuit filed to prevent an actually harmful project, insisting on a genuine environmental impact analysis, fighting to establish conditions that reduce real harm — this is what CEQA was designed to enable. The community benefit is in the environmental protection, and the settlement, if it happens, reflects genuine mitigation requirements.
Greenmail uses legal tools to achieve financial outcomes. The environmental claim is the mechanism, not the goal. The settlement payment goes to the organization, not to environmental mitigation or community benefit. The project that was “opposed” proceeds after the settlement, often with no changes to its design — because the design was never the real problem.
The distinction matters because the organizations that use this model benefit from the credibility that legitimate environmental advocacy has earned. They invoke the language of environmental protection and community health while pursuing outcomes that have nothing to do with either. The communities they claim to represent deserve the full picture.
The Imperial Valley Stakes
Imperial Valley is at the center of two of California’s most significant emerging economic opportunities: Lithium Valley and technology infrastructure. Both depend on large private investment in projects with significant environmental footprints. Both are vulnerable to organized CEQA opposition by organizations with financial motives to slow or block development.
If greenmail becomes the established toll on development in this region, the economic opportunities that the Valley’s residents need — the union construction jobs, the tax revenue, the permanent operational positions — will be priced out of existence. The settlement demands will be included in project cost projections. The cost projections will determine whether projects get financed. The financing decisions will determine whether Imperial Valley captures its economic future or watches it move to Nevada.
CEQA reform is a state-level policy question. But the community-level response is also available: naming what is happening, holding organizations accountable for documented demands, and insisting that the legal framework of environmental protection not be used as a private revenue mechanism at the expense of the community’s economic future.
