September 1, 2026
SAN DIEGO — After years of being tied up in litigation over the California Environmental Quality Act, the Midway Rising sports arena and housing project has cleared what may be its final major obstacle — not in a courtroom, but in Sacramento. In the closing days of the legislative session, state lawmakers approved a last-minute bill that would immediately shield the project from environmental lawsuits, handing Mayor Todd Gloria and the project’s billionaire-backed developers the legal cover that years of local review could not secure.
The project itself is substantial: a 25-story professional arena, 4,250 housing units, and nearly 15 acres of public parks, built on a long-vacant parking lot in the Midway District. Gloria made the arena’s redevelopment a centerpiece of his January State of the City address, telling residents facing a shrinking municipal budget, “Let me be crystal clear… the redevelopment of the sports arena will move forward. We will get this done.” Senate Bill 344, authored in the final stretch of session, is how Sacramento got it done for him.
If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the law would let developers rely on the city’s existing environmental review to satisfy CEQA and would immediately bar further environmental lawsuits against the project. Newsom has until September 30 to sign or veto it. Given his history of supporting CEQA carveouts for major developments — including a manufacturing-hub deal for the tech-backed California Forever project and legislation ending environmental suits over Kern County oil rigs — few close observers expect a veto.
For San Diego officials, the maneuver amounts to a legislative end-run around a legal fight the city kept losing. “San Diego in particular has had some bad experiences with CEQA litigation over efforts to rezone this very area,” said UC Davis property law professor Chris Elmendorf, referring to court rulings that had already gone against the project. “I think in light of that experience it’s totally understandable that the proponents of the project would be going to the Legislature and asking for help.”
That help came through a process critics call by its plainest name: a gut-and-amend, in which lawmakers stripped an unrelated bill and rewrote it with narrowly tailored language covering only Midway Rising’s financing and construction requirements. When legislators returned from recess in August, some began publicly distancing the bill from the Midway project specifically, insisting it was unrelated — even as its language applied to little else.
Opponents in the surrounding neighborhood were not persuaded. “The entire reasoning behind the gut-and-amend bill is to avoid having the project subject to the entire CEQA process,” said Eric Law, a longtime Point Loma resident who chairs the neighborhood group leading opposition to the project. “What they’re trying to do is avoid informed decision-making.” Law and other critics argue the city’s original environmental review understated the project’s true impacts on traffic, density, and the surrounding coastal community — precisely the kind of scrutiny CEQA litigation exists to force.
Not every Democrat in Sacramento signed on either. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner of Solana Beach, who represents part of the Midway District, declined to vote on the bill — a non-vote that counts procedurally as a no. In a public statement, Boerner argued the move cuts against the state’s own housing goals: if California wants to solve its housing crisis, she said, it needs to preserve the public’s ability to scrutinize projects and sue when legitimate concerns arise, not strip that ability away project by project through end-of-session deals.
The developers at the center of the arrangement have said little publicly. The Kroenke Group, the real estate arm of Denver billionaire Stan Kroenke’s business empire and a key partner in the redevelopment, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did other project representatives named in reporting on the deal.
The Midway Rising fight is not an isolated case — it is the latest entry in a pattern this legislative session of the state stepping in to override local environmental review for politically favored, high-profile projects, from Bay Area tech ventures to Central Valley oil production. What distinguishes Midway Rising is the visibility of the trade-off: a public arena and thousands of housing units, built faster and with legal certainty, in exchange for a surrounding community’s ability to challenge the project’s design in court.
For Gloria, a signature secured in Sacramento may prove more durable than one secured at the ballot box or in a courtroom. For Point Loma residents who spent years fighting the project through the CEQA process the state just bypassed, the message is less ambiguous: when local opposition proves durable enough, the fix, increasingly, gets made somewhere else.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was produced under editorial direction and review by The Navarro Report using AI-assisted research and drafting.