Rollbacks of environmental protections are all the rage these days. While a lot of us are focused on changes at the federal level, trouble is brewing closer to home as well. It has become increasingly popular to blame environmental reviews and the underlying laws that ensure project impacts are quantified and mitigated for all manner of societal ills. Delays in commercial development, energy facilities, public construction, roadways all get attributed, no matter what other headwinds a project faces, to environmental reviews and associated appeals processes. But perhaps more than any other sector, the housing community has focused its ire on environmental rules and zoning restrictions for the relative scarcity and high cost of housing as if there were no other factors involved.
The issue has gained such traction that California recently exempted many project types, including some significant housing development, from its landmark environmental review law. Many major projects are now able to proceed without the assessment and mitigation of their impacts, with California having prioritized the speed of project delivery over the protection of its air and water resources.
But that’s California, so while perhaps bad for their environment, why should Cape Cod care? We should all care because the same arguments that prevailed in California are gaining traction in Massachusetts. Recent provisions in the major housing legislation passed last year made it easier to site housing development. The current environmental bond before the State Legislature proposes limiting the review of some housing projects and also limiting the basis for appeals under the Wetlands Protection Act. Maybe the provision will pass, maybe it won’t, but we in the environmental field can’t say we didn’t see this coming.
The next move is collectively ours. We can, and will, push back on compromising environmental review standards. Of perhaps greater importance to Cape Codders concerned with the environment is to ensure that the priority natural resource areas within the remaining 14 percent of our land mass that is neither protected nor developed is preserved to the greatest extent possible. It seems clear from here that we cannot rely on regulatory processes to protect these remaining critical habitat so important to our future.
Cape Cod needs a major push to put these acres in conservation status in perpetuity. Owning land with permanent conservation restrictions is really the best and only way to assure it is not sacrificed to development.
APCC is working on a project that will provide additional tools and strategies to our partners in the land conservation world so that we can collectively protect the remaining open space we need to preserve Cape Cod for future generations. Stay tuned.
