California appeals court blocks massive housing project over climate risks

(CN) — A California appeals court struck down one of the state’s largest planned communities, finding Thursday that Los Angeles County officials violated environmental law when they approved a sprawling 12,000-acre housing project in the wildfire-prone Antelope Valley.

The appellate court upheld a lower court’s rejection of the multibillion-dollar Centennial development, finding that county officials failed to comply with environmental law when they approved the Tejon Ranch Company’s plan.

The Centennial Specific Plan would have created a new city 65 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, featuring nearly 20,000 homes and more than 10 million square feet of commercial space.

While the court agreed that the Superior Court of Los Angeles had properly rejected the environmentalists’ arguments the environmental review didn’t properly cover wildlife, native vegetation and alternatives to the project, it sided with them on the review of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The county had argued that California’s cap-and-trade program would essentially neutralize most of the Centennial project’s estimated 157,000 tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups, however, said that approach was misleading and didn’t account for the project’s true impact.

“The county failed to proceed in a manner required by law when it applied the cap-and-trade program to the Centennial project’s estimated unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions, which minimized the project’s environmental impact and rendered the EIR prejudicially misleading,” Presiding Justice Gonzalo Martinez wrote for the three-judge panel.

Cap-and-trade is designed to limit emissions from industrial polluters and utilities — not housing developments, the panel said. The county’s environmental analysis claimed the program would reduce Centennial’s emissions by 96%, a figure the panel found legally indefensible.

“This is a victory for Los Angeles and California because it cautions developers against building poorly planned projects that put people’s lives at risk,” Aruna Prabhala, senior attorney and urban wildlands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The law explicitly states that climate, wildfire and other environmental harms must be fully factored in when building a risky project of this size. I’m pleased that the court understood the real danger of allowing Centennial to be built without thorough environmental review.”

During oral arguments in April, Jennifer Hernandez of Holland & Knight, representing the developers, insisted the county never claimed cap-and-trade would eliminate emissions entirely.

“It never says, Your Honor, that cap-and-trade is a mitigation requirement. It never nets out. It never says 157 goes away magically because of cap-and-trade,” Hernandez said.

Michelle Black, representing the Center for Biological Diversity, countered then that the environmental report overstated the benefits.

“When you see something that says 96% of the emissions are covered or reduced, you’re going to believe that, especially when it’s over and over in the findings in all of the descriptions in the hearings,” she said.

Martinez — joined by Associate Justices Natalie Stone and Gail Feuer — ultimately confirmed that “the [California Environmental Quality Act] guidelines contain an additionality requirement which forecloses applying an energy provider’s or fuel supplier’s obligatory cap-and-trade compliance to offset the estimated greenhouse gas emissions of a land-use project.”

For Tejon Ranch, the decision represents a major setback after years of planning and regulatory review. The court ordered the county to decertify the project’s environmental analysis and halt any development that could physically alter the land.

The company, which owns 270,000 acres across California, has not announced whether it will appeal to the state Supreme Court. Any attempt to revive the project would require a new review addressing the court’s concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and wildfire risks— a persistent challenge within the state.

“California has more plant species at risk of extinction than any other state in the U.S., in large part because of habitat loss and climate change," Nick Jensen, conservation director at the California Native Plant Society, said in a statement. “In the face of these threats and increasing wildfire severity, we know better than to develop sensitive habitats in fire-prone areas. We must do better in an era of increasing wildfire severity.”

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