They didn't want to stump up the cash for the fines & other costs.

But there was nothing progressive about the fines the city was racking up: San Francisco’s Supreme Court win negates proposed EPA penalties in the hundreds of millions of dollars and mandatory sewer system upgrades that would cost billions and billions.

In my experience, a lot of these politics are purely performative. Politicians get elected on the promise of 'reducing regulations' to 'release the economy', without any connection to reality. In office they than have to do something that looks like the thing they fought for. We've seen the same after Brexit. The 'bad and idiotic' EU regulations were dropped and untreated sewage was let into the sea.