Feb 26: State water agencies' human capital, regulatory burden, and public engagement; state preemption for data centers

New Legal Research on Building Abundance

Highlights:

🏛 State Capacity: Impacts of human capital and overregulation on state water agencies

🏗 Local Deregulation: State preemption fast-tracking AI data centers’ zoning and environmental review

⚡️Energy: Solar NIMBYs are not misinformed, they have genuine adverse interests

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🏛💧 State (Water) Capacity

• Employing more senior water treatment experts reduces safety and reporting violations
  Human Capital: Operator Quality and Water Utility Performance—Robin Rose Saywitz (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  Texas data show higher-credentialed water utility professionals significantly improve SDWA compliance. Adding one top-licensed Class A operator boosts monitoring compliance by 11 percentage points, roughly equivalent to expanding the entire workforce tenfold.

• New safety rules threaten to overwhelm water agencies
  The State of Safe Water: The Future of SDWA Implementation for Primacy Agencies—J. Alan Roberson (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  State water agencies face a structural capacity crisis: a $375 million annual funding gap is widening as new PFAS and lead rules add hundreds of thousands of mandatory staff hours. The Lead and Copper Rule Improvement alone would consume 71% of all currently available state staff time.

• Water Agency public engagement is not building trust; look to Australia

  Thirsty for Deliberation? Improving Public Engagement to Protect the Nation’s Drinking Water—Amber Wichowsky & Jill McNew-Birren (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  Existing SDWA public engagement—Consumer Confidence Reports, notice-and-comment, public hearings—is largely ineffective at building trust or mobilizing communities. Drawing on Australia’s experience with deliberative mini-publics in utility price-setting, the authors argue the U.S. drinking water sector needs genuine two-way deliberation, not one-way information transmission, to address infrastructure, pollution, and trust deficits.

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⚡️Energy

• Solar NIMBYs are not misinformed, they have genuine adverse interests
  Local Opposition to Renewable Energy: Integrating Misinformation and Controversy Perspectives—David J. Hess (Society & Natural Resources)
  Local solar opponents draw on mainstream, credible sources—not fossil-fuel or conservative media echo chambers. Analyzing 437 statements from 81 opposition groups in the US and UK, 79% of cited sources were neutral or pro-renewable. Dismissing opposition as NIMBY misinformation misses legitimate policy disputes over farmland, property values, and community compensation.

• Nuclear power is the solution to rising energy demand
  Nuclear Power's Role in Meeting Energy Demand While Combating Global Warming and Climate Change—Robert M. Andersen (Iowa Law Review)
  Nuclear power can safely meet rising U.S. energy demand while cutting emissions, despite lingering post-Three Mile Island fears. Bipartisan legislation supports industry revival, and the key unresolved obstacle—nuclear waste—is best addressed through interim storage combined with reprocessing.

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🚊 Transit

• California’s playbook for EV adoption
  Systemic acceleration capacity in net-zero transitions: electrifying transportation in California—Nicholas Goedeking & Karoline S. Rogge (Environmental Politics)
  California leads the US in electric vehicle adoption because of decades-old laws and institutions that let the state set its own pollution rules, delegate policy to technical experts, and earmark cap-and-trade revenue for clean energy—creating a self-reinforcing system that’s hard to replicate quickly elsewhere.

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🧪 Science & Innovation

• Generative AI may render the patent system obsolete

  Creative Destruction for the Patent System? Impact of Generative AI—Henry H. Perritt, Jr. (Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology)
  Generative AI creates a paradox for patent law: it can invent anything, but by simultaneously embodying the knowledge of a hypothetical person of ordinary skill in any art, it renders all those inventions obvious. The result could be a world where everything is invented but nothing is patentable—hastening the patent system’s drift toward irrelevance as inventors turn to trade secrets and first-mover advantage instead.

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🏗 Local Deregulation

• Federal cash for local deregulation opt-in
  Right to Build Zones—Adam Ozimek, Jess Remington, and Tina Lee (Economic Innovation Group Concept Paper)

  A proposed federal program pays localities $10,000 per permitted unit if they designate specific zones where by-right permitting replaces discretionary review and density restrictions are lifted. States opt in first, unlocking participation for their municipalities, which choose the zone boundaries. HUD sets model codes and selects applicants competitively.

• State preemption fast-tracking AI data centers’ zoning and environmental review
  Planning Under Preemption: State Power and Local Authority in the AI Data Center Era—Justin Kollar (Journal of the American Planning Association)
  States are stripping local governments of zoning and environmental review authority to fast-track AI data centers, using statutory overrides, utility governance, and tax incentives. Cases from West Virginia, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arizona illustrate how planning authority is shifting to state agencies and corporate actors. The author argues planners must respond by developing fluency in utility and water governance—the systems now effectively making land use decisions—rather than simply managing project impacts after the fact.

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