You've probably been hearing a lot about budget bills, environmental reviews, and labor fights out here on the West Coast. It's all adding up to probably the biggest policy change in modern California history. Here's a breakdown for the perplexed.

In 1970, California joined various states in mandating that all public projects undertake an environmental review, disclosing and mitigating impacts. This made sense amid a frenzy of freeways, urban renewal, etc. Thus, CEQA: the California Environmental Quality Act.

The enforcement mechanism was intuitive: if an environmental review should have been conducted and wasn't, or failed to study some relevant impact, or failed to undertake reasonable mitigation, nearly anyone could easily sue and force the issue.

The trouble is that, with every subsequent CEQA lawsuit made the law more expansive -- and more complex. Reviews got longer and longer. Environmental reviews went from short pamphlets to thousand page tomes that could take years to complete.