State bill could speed up San Jose Diridon Station rebuild

A new state bill could cut a year off the redevelopment of Diridon Station in San Jose by exempting it from California’s landmark environmental law — and the state lawmaker at the forefront of the effort is determined to keep it on track.

Senate Bill 1375, introduced by state Sen. Dave Cortese, whose district covers San Jose and much of Santa Clara County, would exempt certain rail station hub modernization projects from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The bill would streamline the review process and shorten the construction timeline for the project.

Prior environmental reviews for high-speed rail and Caltrain didn’t cover the full station footprint, Cortese said.

“The alternative is to do an (environmental impact report) all over again. That would be at least the third one,” Cortese told San José Spotlight. “You wouldn’t want the CEQA to be the bottleneck again on something that’s already been looked at a few times.”

The bill cleared the Assembly floor last week with San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra as co-author. The bill was amended after it left the state Senate, and it’s expected to return there for a concurrence vote before heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Cortese said he expects the vote as early as this week.

Projects that show significant or cumulative impact under CEQA, or the potential for it, require a full environmental impact report. Earlier reports for high-speed rail and Caltrain covered only the ground those projects planned to build on, Cortese said, so work extending past those lines leaves two options: leave that ground out of the project or do another report, a process he said can easily take two to three years.

Eugene Bradley, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley Transit Users, who primarily follows VTA and Santa Clara County transit offered his brief take on SB 1375.

“Such a bill does not surprise me, given the need to bring Diridon into the 21st century, that is, in terms of having high-speed rail,” Bradley told San José Spotlight.

Diridon Station is expected to be the future centerpiece of Northern California’s public transportation network, but the project has already spent years working through environmental review before it can move toward construction.

Cortese said the bill came about after he talked with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, and connected with the city’s Department of Transportation. Cortese’s main concern was that the exemption not become a backdoor for a housing project the Legislature hadn’t vetted.

“I told the city I’m not comfortable with (SB 1375) being any kind of a Trojan horse or a bait and switch or a masquerade for including some kind of a major housing project,” Cortese said.

Where displacement was likely to occur, due to construction around the community, Cortese wanted contingencies written into the bill — such as replacing lost housing with new market-rate homes and affordable housing  — or giving tenants facing relocation access to legal counsel, along with a community benefits discussion.

The Diridon Station project is approaching year two of the three- to four-year environmental phase, after spending seven years ironing out the vision for the redevelopment, Marian Lee, Caltrain consultant and Diridon Station program liaison, said.

“If we get the CEQA exemption, we think it will shave about a year off of our overall time frame,” Lee told San José Spotlight. “While there aren’t a whole lot of administrative cost savings with this, the time savings are significant because it has implications to just trying to build it sooner than later.”

The exemption applies specifically to the station, a $3 billion to $6 billion project, Lee said. Shortening the environmental phase would move it into preliminary engineering sooner.

San Jose sponsored SB 1375 and Caltrain supported it, Devon Ryan, Caltrain’s government and community affairs manager, said.

“Sen. Cortese has been a leader in the environmental space, and this is just yet another example of his leadership getting us to a cleaner future,” Ryan told San José Spotlight. “Which is what we are trying to do with (Diridon Station), because we think it will be a way to highly encourage people to take public transit.”  The project has to clear environmental review at both the state level under CEQA and the federal level under the National Environmental Policy Act, and a state law can’t waive the federal requirement, according to Jeffrey Hare, a San Jose State University lecturer who teaches land use and planning law.

“It’s not removing the environmental review process,” Hare told San José Spotlight. “It’s a streamlining bill to try and remove some of the unnecessary duplication of environmental review.”

Much of the land around Diridon has already been examined in earlier environmental reviews for high-speed rail, Caltrain and Google’s Downtown West project, Hare said.

“If you can carve a year out of the (Diridon Station redevelopment) through some removal of some red tape, it’s a win for everybody,” Hare said.

Contact Gabriel Symkowick at [email protected] or @SymkowickGabe on X.