By Patric Hedlund
California State Supreme Court judges handed down a 5-2 verdict Monday that sent a shockwave through the development industry of this state.
Five of the seven judges rejected the environmental impact report (EIR) for the proposed Newhall Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley. Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), development cannot proceed without a valid EIR.
The Newhall project, like Tejon Ranch’s Centennial, envisioned building a brand new city on 12,000 acres of undeveloped land north of Los Angeles.
Sprawl & Greenhouse Gas
Newhall anticipated bringing about 58,000 new people to live west of Santa Clarita off Interstate 5 in an area without existing infrastructure and services, “a poster child for sprawl,” critics claim.
Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote the majority verdict for the court. She pointed to the lack of proof presented by the Newhall Land & Farming Company when stating in their EIR that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the development would comply with state standards.
Martha Bridegam of The California Planning & Development Report observed, “The court said Newhall could not determine the significance of greenhouse gas emissions simply by applying the raw statewide regulatory goal of ‘reducing GHG emissions 29 percent below business as usual levels’ by the year 2020…. The court held that an agency trying to apply the statewide goal locally should explain how the local situation relates to the statewide goal.”
Twelve years ago the requirement to include greenhouse gas calculations in EIRs at all was fairly new and the standards were poorly defined.
Now the bar has been raised for proving effective reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by developments.
Twelve years ago the urgency of a global warming crisis was not as widely understood as it is becoming today.
The Newhall Ranch verdict November 30 was delivered as the most significant international conference in history on slowing climate change was being held in Paris, attended by the world’s major leaders.
Under Governor Edmund G. ‘Jerry’ Brown and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger the State of California has become an aggressive international leader to achieve “Net Zero”—setting ever-higher goals to limit GHG emissions before the global climate trend is irreversible.
There is evidence that California’s severe drought (now entering its fifth year) is linked to climate change.
Analysts said the California Supreme Court’s ruling may create a stiff precedent for other sprawl-oriented developments if they are still using legacy design principles from 12 to 20 years ago.
CDFW & the Stickleback
Judges were also skeptical about the plan of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to allow trapping and moving the endangered unarmored three-spine stickleback, a freshwater fish famous among scientists for its elaborate mating dance.
Justice Werdegar called the EIR’s plan “a take,” writing that state law bars the relocation of a protected species as a mitigation measure.
“One struggles to imagine the circumstances in which a … document would propose mitigating a project’s adverse impacts on a fully protected species by killing or otherwise intentionally harming members of the species,” she said.
Here in our own neighborhood, the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife was strongly criticized by California condor scientists for allowing Tejon Ranch a license for “nonlethal take” of condor.
Tejon’s plan is to haze them to keep them from returning to their historically defined critical habitat.
Tejon secured permission from the Kern County Board of Supervisors in 2009 to build parts of Tejon Mountain Village in habitat said to be critical for the survival of the endangered condor as a species.
In the Newhall Ranch case, five judges agreed that molesting an endangered species as a way to “protect it” is not acceptable mitigation.
This is part of the December 4, 2015 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.
