Oxnard—During its Tuesday, Dec. 3 meeting, the City Council received an update to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) guidelines and aligned them with the State’s guidelines.
Project Planner Heather Davis presented the update along with Planning & Sustainability Manager Kathleen Mallory, George Dix from Rincon Development, and AICP John Muggridge from Feher & Pierce, and Davis said CEQA was last updated in 2017.
Davis said the CEQA Guidelines provide the Staff and development community guidelines for preparing environmental documents for Oxnard’s developmental projects.
“The environmental topics within the City’s threshold guidelines correlate with the City’s 19 topic areas of the State’s CEQA statutes and guidelines,” she said. “Most of the updates are minor and are brought about for consistency, and they are reorganized to align with the State’s document structure or encompass negligible revisions to thresholds.”
She said energy, greenhouse gas emissions, wildfire, and transportation highlight four key changes and noted most were addressed in Oxnard’s 2017 CEQA Guidelines and now are standalone sections.
“Another key change is the incorporation of updates for the State CEQA thresholds, which adds new and specific methodologies for analyzing environmental impacts,” she said. “Energy is new in the State’s CEQA checklist, which the…
