Gov. Gavin Newsom, lagging far behind his campaign pledge to build millions more homes, signed on Monday the most significant rollback in decades to California’s core environmental law, which has long been blamed for construction delays and soaring home prices.

Assembly Bill 130 and Senate Bill 131 shield nine types of projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a 1970 state law that requires builders to assess potential environmental impacts from their projects and any measures that could lessen them.

Those project types include child care centers, health clinics, food banks, farmworker housing, broadband, wildfire prevention, water infrastructure, public parks or trails and, notably, advanced manufacturing.

“This is the most consequential housing reform we’ve seen in modern history in California,” Newsom said Monday evening before signing the bills. “These two bills I’m about to sign are transformative.”

The changes were met with opposition from environmental and community groups, which said industrial plants will be more easily built in low-income communities. They also said the exemptions will advantage developers by limiting public oversight and could create legal confusion.

“This bill is the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory,” a coalition of opponents, including the California Environmental Justice Alliance and the Western Center on Law & Poverty, wrote in a letter to Newsom and legislators.

At the over three-hour hearing preceding the vote on Monday, dozens of members of the public spoke in opposition, with some holding signs saying, “When CEQA is silenced, polluters speak louder.”

Asha Sharma, state policy manager with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, called the changes “a back-room, last-minute deal” that made the state budget “dependent on gutting environmental review for resource-intensive and polluting industrial projects.”

“This law would not harm all California communities equally,” Sharma said. “This budget deal is an attack on lower-income communities of color that consistently get sited for harmful industrial projects.”

The governor had two top allies: Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland and state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, two Democrats who led the push for reform.