Since 2015, California law has said that a tribe does not need Washington’s permission to protect its ancestors’ places. Under the 2014 tribal consultation law known as AB 52, any California Native American tribe on the state Native American Heritage Commission’s contact list can ask a city, county or state agency to consult before a project is approved. That includes tribes the federal government has never recognized, such as the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Proposition 45, on the Nov. 3 statewide ballot, would end that for a large share of the projects that get built in California.
The initiative creates a new, faster track under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for projects it calls “essential.” For those projects, it rewrites who counts as a tribe. In the measure’s text, a “Consulting Tribe” is “a tribe that appears on the most recent list published by the United States pursuant to the Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act of 1994,” and that is “traditionally and culturally affiliated with the geographic area of the proposed essential project.” The measure then says that wherever the tribal consultation sections of CEQA say “California Native American tribe,” they “shall instead mean, and be read as, ‘Consulting Tribe’ when the project is an essential project.”
The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst put it in one line. Prop. 45 “requires the agency and applicant to consult about the project only with California native tribes that have been formally recognized by the federal government,” the LAO analysis says. “Current law requires consultation with a wider range of tribes.”
What counts as “essential”
The new track is optional for developers, and the list of projects that qualify is long. Under the measure’s definitions, essential projects include most housing, from apartments and subdivisions to senior and student housing and office-to-housing conversions. They also include water systems, clean energy generation and transmission lines, broadband, schools and colleges, medical facilities, fire stations and wildfire fuel-reduction work, public transit and road projects, and electric vehicle charging. The infrastructure that serves those projects is covered too. The measure excludes jails and other detention facilities, new oil and gas production facilities and the high-speed rail project.
A project applicant “may elect to utilize none, some, or all” of the new rules, the text says. Prop. 45 would also apply to projects already in the pipeline when it takes effect, five days after the Secretary of State certifies the vote. The Legislature could amend it only by a two-thirds vote of each house, and only with changes that are “consistent with, and furthers the purposes of” the measure.
Alongside the tribal change, the measure sets fixed deadlines for environmental review and caps public comment periods. According to an analysis by the consulting firm Environmental Science Associates, comment would be limited to 45 days on an environmental impact report and 20 days on a negative declaration. It also lets the applicant, not the agency, write the single project alternative, and it restricts what courts can do when an agency breaks the law. The LAO estimates first-year costs for state and local governments in the high tens of millions of dollars a year, potentially more than $100 million.
What it would mean in Ohlone country
The Muwekma Ohlone are not on the federal list. Interior denied the Tribe’s acknowledgment petition in 2002, even though the Department had found that its ancestors were federally recognized as the Verona Band in the early 20th century. Under Prop. 45, the Tribe would not qualify as a Consulting Tribe for any essential project, no matter how close it came to a village site or a burial ground.
The second half of the definition may matter even more in the Bay Area. A Consulting Tribe must be both federally recognized and culturally affiliated with the project area. Federal agencies have sometimes found that no recognized tribe fits that description here. When NASA’s Ames Research Center planned runway and utility work at Moffett Federal Airfield in 2018, it wrote to the Muwekma that “no Federally Recognized Tribes are associated with this location,” according to a May 14, 2018 letter NASA posted publicly. It invited the Tribe to consult anyway, because the Native American Heritage Commission had indicated the Tribe “may have an interest” in the area. Under Prop. 45’s definition, a project in a place like that could have no tribe with a right to formal consultation at all.
The Muwekma use the consultation rights they have now. When the City of Milpitas proposed a General Plan amendment in May 2025, it sent formal notice to the Tribe. The Tribe answered that it offers “Tribal Consultations as defined under Section 106, CEQA, Assembly Bill (AB) 52, Senate Bill (SB) 18 Consultation, and California Public Resources Code § 21080.3.1,” according to the exchange the city published with its environmental review. That General Plan notice falls under a separate law, SB 18, which Prop. 45 does not rewrite. But the AB 52 rights the Tribe cites are the ones the measure would replace for essential projects.
Tribes left off the list could still send in public comments, inside the shorter comment windows. That is not the same thing, wrote the Sonoma County group Russian Riverkeeper, which opposes the measure. Prop. 45 would give its new protections “only to federally recognized tribes affiliated with the project area, excluding dozens of California tribes without federal recognition,” it wrote in an explainer. “Those tribes could still submit public comments, but that would not replace the formal consultation process through which ancestral places, cultural resources, and tribal knowledge are considered.”
What supporters say
The Yes on 45 campaign argues the measure makes tribal consultation stronger, not weaker, for the tribes it covers. Its tribal fact sheet points to an early screening step that checks the Sacred Lands File and state archaeological records before an application is complete, an optional early meeting at a tribe’s request, a rule that avoidance comes before mitigation, required use of tribal traditional knowledge, and agreed mitigation that becomes a binding condition of approval. The text does say that Prop. 45’s deadlines “shall not alter the duration of consultation” with a Consulting Tribe.
The campaign does not hide who is left out. “Under Prop 45, early identification and AB 52 consultation apply only to federally recognized tribes, protecting sovereignty and preserving government-to-government relationships,” the fact sheet says. The ad disclosure on the same document lists the California Building Industry Association among the committee’s top funders.
Who is opposed
The No on 45 coalition lists the Amah Mutsun Land Trust and the Coalition of California State Tribes under “Tribal Groups,” and the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples among its civil rights members. It also includes the California Democratic Party, the State Building and Construction Trades Council, the League of Women Voters of California and hundreds of environmental groups.
In the South Bay, the land conservation group Green Foothills wrote that “Prop 45 also silences our local tribal partners.” The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band’s input “has been invaluable in stopping immensely destructive projects, but Prop 45 would strip them, and all the tribes in our region, of their right to weigh in on the cultural impacts of proposed projects,” the group wrote on Sept. 28.
The Association of Environmental Professionals, whose members prepare CEQA documents, reached the same reading in its fall 2026 newsletter. The measure keeps formal AB 52 consultation, it wrote, “but, critically, only requires consultation with federally recognized tribes, leaving out any obligation to consult with non-federally recognized tribes, of which there are many.”
A fight the Legislature already had
Prop. 45’s definition is close to the idea that split California tribes in the Capitol last year. In 2025, Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters) used the bill number AB 52 for a rewrite of the tribal consultation law, sponsored by the Pechanga Band of Indians, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the bill would have given federally recognized tribes full government-to-government consultation, while tribes without recognition would have been treated as “additional consulting parties.”
Tribes without recognition fought it. “This amendment [to 2014’s AB 52] is disheartening. It’s an atrocity,” Andrew Salas, hereditary chief of the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians–Kizh Nation, told Capitol Weekly, which reported that the author turned the measure into a two-year bill. Its April 28, 2025 committee hearing was canceled at the author’s request. In January 2026 the bill was amended into an unrelated measure on farmer equity advisory committees, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Sept. 27.
A second 2026 bill on tribal cultural resources, Sen. Aisha Wahab’s SB 1326 on mitigation measures, passed the Senate 33-0 but was held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Aug. 13. With the two-year session over, Prop. 45 is the CEQA change still pending that would most directly affect tribes without federal recognition.
What happens next
Monday, Oct. 19, is the regular deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 3 election. Californians who miss it can still register and cast a provisional ballot at their county elections office or a vote center through Election Day. If Prop. 45 passes, its new rules would apply to essential projects already under review as soon as it takes effect.
Muwekma Times did not find a public statement from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe on Prop. 45. We will keep following the measure, and the rest of the tribal cultural resources agenda in Sacramento, through the election and into the next session. Readers with information can reach us through our tip page.
Leave a Reply