Environment: California Environmental Quality Act: overriding consideration.

(1) The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires a lead agency, as defined, to prepare, or cause to be prepared, and certify the completion of, an environmental impact report (EIR) on a project that it proposes to carry out or approve that may have a significant effect on the environment or to adopt a negative declaration if it finds that the project will not have that effect. The CEQA also requires a lead agency to prepare a mitigated negative declaration for a project that may have a significant effect on the environment if revisions in the project would avoid or mitigate that effect and there is no substantial evidence that the project, as revised, would have a significant effect on the environment. For projects whose environmental impacts can not be mitigated to less than significance, existing law authorizes a lead agency to find that specified overriding economic, legal, social, technological, or other benefits of the project outweigh the significant effects on the environment. If an EIR has been prepared and certified for a program, plan, policy, or ordinance, a lead agency is required to use a tiered EIR for a later project if the lead agency determines that…