Pretty much. Too bad it’s so narrowly focused on one project.
On Tuesday, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a provision that allows any challenges to the Farmers Field environmental impact statement to be resolved within 175 days.
“It’s time for big ideas and big projects like this,” Brown said, via ESPNLosAngeles.com. “This is the way we get people working. As the government, we’re not building anything, that’s what the private sector and individuals do but we can pave the way. I’m signing a bill focused on the stadium and convention center and another broadly focused on cutting red tape all over the state. We’re going to remove some regulations and speed things up while also protecting the environment, but we have to do it in a practical way because there are too damn many regulations.”
Brown said that he expected Majestic Realty, which finagled the full environmental exemption in 2009, to file or support a lawsuit that would have been aimed at killing the Farmers Field deal by tying it up in court for years. The new law prevents litigation from being used as a strategic business weapon.
If only mom and pop businesses and non-NFL corporations could get the same sort of protections from overzealous lawyers, environmental groups, and other abusers of the legal system. And doctors…
More: Now that I’m a little more caffeinated, I see that Gov. Brown actually is planning to cut red tape on a broader basis beyond the stadium project. He has shown signs of breaking with the sclerosis of big government a couple of times this year, vetoing a ski helmet law on the grounds that it’s not the government’s business to dictate that sort of thing, and more significantly, vetoing a union card check bill.
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