Gov. Kathy Hochul’s announced $268 billion state budget is drawing criticism from environmental advocates who say it would weaken a key law that gives residents a voice on major projects planned near homes, streams, wetlands and forests.
At stake is the State Environmental Quality Review Act, which Hochul wants to amend to help spur badly needed housing. Critics, many of whom have supported her Let Them Build program, worry the changes would lean too far in favor of developers.
“We agree that there’s room for modernization,” said Tracy Brown, the president of Riverkeeper. “However, the governor’s proposal to make sweeping changes to SEQRA, in our experience and view, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Under the agreement as described by Hochul’s office, qualifying housing projects would be exempt from SEQRA review if they meet certain criteria: up to 300 units in urbanized areas, up to 100 units in non-urban areas, and up to 20 units in areas without zoning.
The budget changes now leave local officials, planning boards, developers and environmental groups sorting through the same central question: whether faster review will help communities build the homes they need, or whether it will leave residents with less power to understand what is being built around them.
Sean Butler, a spokesperson for the governor, said the exemptions wouldn’t apply to farmland, sites in coastal erosion areas or floodplains, unless a municipality has reduced flood risk by requiring new construction to be built above expected flood levels. In rural areas outside New York City, the parcels would also have to sit next to or across from land that has already been built on or altered, Butler said.
Supporters say the changes are limited and would encourage needed housing. Environmental advocates say the restrictions still leave open questions about how the exemptions would apply in rural communities, especially where land may contain wetlands, forest or other sensitive areas.
The budget agreement would also add exemptions for some clean water infrastructure, public parks and trails, and public schools in New York City, while setting a two-year deadline for completing an environmental impact statement.
SEQRA requires local, regional and state agencies to examine environmental impacts alongside social and economic considerations before approving, funding or undertaking certain projects. The law often starts with an initial review to determine whether a proposal may have significant environmental effects. If an agency finds that it does, the project may require a more detailed environmental impact statement.
Brown said Riverkeeper is especially concerned about smaller communities, where planning staffs are thin and zoning may be limited or nonexistent.
“To combine into one bucket, all of the cities across the state, except for New York City, with all of the other communities and villages and hamlets, is just nuts,” Brown said. “It doesn’t make any sense for these smaller communities.”
Brown said decisions about a law as consequential as SEQRA shouldn’t be made as part of closed-door budget talks.
“This conversation and decisions to make changes to something that is such an important public transparency tool should be happening through legislation,” Brown said. “It should not be happening in closed door budget negotiations.”
She said the governor’s framing of the housing crisis as a problem caused by environmental regulation was too simplistic.
“That is like a perverse simplification of the factors that have kept housing stock small in New York state,” Brown said.
She said more than 20% of towns in New York lack zoning regulations, meaning SEQRA may be one of the only local review mechanisms available to residents. She also said about 90% of projects that enter the SEQRA process receive negative declarations, meaning they don’t go through a full environmental impact review. Even that initial review, she said, gives residents notice and a chance to raise concerns.
Environmental review can be misused to slow needed housing, said Roger Downs, the conservation director for the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter. But Downs said the larger problem is that planning boards too often treat SEQRA as a box to check rather than a public safeguard.
“We see both sides of SEQRA,” Downs said. “Sometimes it is weaponized in a NIMBY way to block affordable housing. That is rare. More often, SEQRA is largely overlooked by planning boards.”
Downs said the concern is not only large resorts, but also housing projects that could qualify for faster approval despite complicated environmental conditions.
“Without environmental review, new housing could be mired in wetlands, built on toxic contamination sites, and decimate irreplaceable habitat, with little recourse for impacted communities to challenge,” Downs said.
In Round Top, opponents of the proposed Blackhead Mountain Lodge resort successfully challenged the project’s approval under SEQRA this week. A state Supreme Court judge overturned the Cairo Planning Board’s finding that the resort would have no significant environmental effects, ruling that the board failed to take the required “hard look” at water quality, how much water the resort would draw from local sources, and energy demand.
The ruling invalidated approvals tied to the project and left any renewed proposal needing a fuller environmental review. The 102-acre resort had drawn opposition from residents and environmental groups concerned about groundwater, wastewater, habitat loss and the scale of development in the Round Top hamlet.
For environmental groups, the Round Top decision has become a timely example of why SEQRA matters at the same time Albany is moving to narrow its reach.
Woodstock is short of adequate housing, said Andy Mossey, the executive director of the Woodstock Land Conservancy, and Hochul is right to try to help developers move projects forward more quickly. But Mossey said the proposal is “troubling in its vagueness,” particularly around what qualifies as land that has already been built on or altered.
Mossey said he is unsure whether the changes would affect Zena Homes, a housing proposal near Eastwoods Drive in Woodstock that has drawn concern from neighbors and environmental advocates. He said the project is being proposed in an area of “pristine forest” with extensive wetlands nearby.
The Town of Ulster Planning Board is expected to issue a SEQRA declaration on the Zena Homes proposal May 12, said Mossey. The Woodstock Land Conservancy has urged the board to issue a positive declaration, which would require a deeper environmental review.
Mossey said state wetland protections would still apply separately from SEQRA, and that the proposed budget changes wouldn’t directly remove those protections. His broader concern is that weakening SEQRA would limit the ability of communities and environmental advocates to make a case for the land before decisions are made.
Brown said the changes come at a moment when she hoped New York would be strengthening environmental protections, not weakening them.
“At a time when we’re having so much of our public health and environmental protections stripped away federally, we really were hoping the governor would be kind of building up state protections,” Brown said, “and not getting on that bandwagon and weakening the laws that we have at the state level.”
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.