The Two Hundred v. Governor’s Office of Planning & Research

The nonprofit organization The Two Hundred and residents of San Bernardino County in California filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in their lawsuit challenging new California Environmental Quality Act regulations, which the petitioners assert violate the federal and state constitutions, federal and state fair housing laws, the Global Warming Solutions Act, CEQA itself, and other laws. In their motion, the petitioners asked the court to enjoin the part of one of the new regulations that the petitioners describe as making “the act of driving a car or pickup truck (even an electric vehicle), for even a single mile in even a carpool on an existing road, a newly-invented ‘vehicle mile travelled’ (‘VMT’) ‘impact’ to the environment.” They contended that enforcement of the new VMT regulation outside transit priority areas would “worsen housing availability and affordability, thereby causing disparate harms to minority Californian[s],” and that the pandemic had exacerbated the harms. They argued that the legislature had considered and “uniformly rejected” laws requiring VMT reduction to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and that the adoption of the VMT regulation was procedurally deficient.