Seattle is relaxing its environmental review policy, making it a little easier for developers to build in urban centers like the U-District.

The City Council passed a bill the day before Earth Day to allow smaller and medium-sized projects in urban centers to forgo review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), which assesses how buildings would impact the environment, checking things such as air and water quality, land and energy use and transportation and utilities.

Council members said the review unnecessarily duplicates other city regulations that already assess environmental issues, and that raising SEPA thresholds would promote affordable housing and growth in urban centers.

“The SEPA checklist makes sense for really big developments that are going to have significant environmental impact that maybe isn’t addressed by parts of the Seattle code,” said Sally Clark, Seattle City Council member and chair of the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee. “But for the smaller, mid-level projects, the Seattle code does a pretty good job, and the SEPA checklist becomes kind of this redundant thing that doesn’t really play that great of role anymore.”

However, the U-District isn’t ready for the business and residential growth that the revised SEPA thresholds encourage, said Matthew Fox, the president of the U-District Community Council.

“The Sound Transit Light Rail isn’t coming to the U-District until 2018 — 10 years later than it was supposed to,” he said. “In the mean time, we’ve gotten all of this development, no significant new transportation structure and the U-District is getting increasingly gridlocked as a result of all this new construction. I think the city just kind of wants to wish that fact away.”

The new development may make it difficult for students to find affordable apartments in the U-District, said Fox, who is also the co-chair of the City University Community Advisory Committee.

“With all this new construction, they tear down an old building that rents $500-600 a month [and] they put up a new building that rents $1200 a month,” he said. “But if you’re supplying expensive apartments, it doesn’t address the demands at the bottom of the market. You can’t build your way out of the problem of supply and demand.”

Under the amended thresholds, individuals can no longer challenge the city’s decision on development projects not subject to SEPA review.

The elimination of public appeal in urban centers is an injustice to those who want to be involved with the development of their neighborhoods, Fox said.

“It’s definitely turning into a more top-down kind of thing,” he said. “That’s a problem because there are a lot of well-informed citizens who understand the land use code a lot better than the Council members do, and the Council members don’t like to hold their own.”

The SEPA thresholds weren’t effective in addressing public appeal for development projects, Clark said.

“If I thought SEPA was a great tool for that involvement, then we wouldn’t have made the change,” she said. “But I just didn’t see that SEPA was giving them what they were looking for.”

The bill raises the number of housing units that could be built without the environmental review from four, six, eight or 20, depending on the zone, to 30 or 80 units when the zone is in an urban center. For commercial development, the bill raises the exemption from 4,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet buildings for nonresidential neighborhoods in urban centers.

“You still have to adhere to all of the environmental protections that are laid out in city code and state code,” Clark said. “Nobody gets off from doing anything that would be required to do, but you don’t have to go through the SEPA checklist until you hit that mark.”

The bill affects the six urban centers in Seattle: the U-District, the greater downtown area (International District, Pioneer Square, Belltown and Pike Place Market), First and Capitol hills, Northgate, Lower Queen Anne and South Lake Union, according to a Seattle Community Council Federation press release.

The council unanimously approved the bill in an 8-0 vote.