RIVERSIDE, Calif. (CN) - A Superior Court judge sided with environmentalists and found that a proposal for a new city of 11,350 homes will irreparably harm the San Jacinto Wildlife Area.
Friends of the Northern San Jacinto Valley sued Riverside County and Nuevo Development Co. 2 years ago, claiming the environmental impact report did not adequately study the proposal's effects on traffic, air quality, greenhouse gas emissions and wildlife.
The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the San Bernardino Audubon Society, and the City of Riverside joined friends as plaintiffs.
"The project is the Villages of Lakeview, extending over 2,800 acres consisting of 11,350 dwellings, a mixed-use town center including some 500,000 square feet of retail, office and commercial uses, public facilities including four schools and a library, and nearly 1,000 acres of open space/conservation areas," Judge Sharon Waters wrote in her proposed statement of decision.
The environmental groups claimed the developers violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by using "unrealistic, unreasonable hypothetical scenarios" to assess its impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
The developer disagreed.
Nuevo said it followed CEQA guidelines by comparing expected emissions to a baseline of zero. It then chose to comply with the Global Warming Solutions Act, which sets standards for improving air quality by 2020, when assessing the project's impacts on emissions in a business-as-usual scenario. Such scenarios predict a future state of things by assuming factors such as population, technology, and laws will stay the same.
Judge Waters acknowledged that regulation policies give agencies a lot of flexibility in setting thresholds for potential environmental impacts. She noted that the policies are unclear on when emissions "are significant to CEQA purposes in relation to GHG [greenhouse gases]."
But the impact report did not actually follow a business-as-usual plan as it claimed, Waters said.
"[It] uses an unrealistic scenario which ignores local planning and zoning laws, strips all vegetation from the project, and contemplates development on mountainous portions of the project site. ... It does not appear the EIR used a 'business as usual' approach but instead adopted a 'worst-case' scenario as it began its evaluation of the GHG emissions," the judge wrote.
She criticized the defendants' use of the ruling in Citizens for Responsible Equitable Environmental Development v. City of Chula Vista, saying that ruling cannot support a project that is impossible to develop in light of current conditions.
"The use of this hypothetical 'BAU' [business as usual] here which is tied neither to existing conditions or reasonably possible conditions serves only to mislead the public and the decision-makers in their understanding of the actual significance of the GHG emissions, and their effect on the environment," Waters wrote.
Waters also found that the impact report did not evaluate the project's impacts on health concerns, and that its analysis of traffic impacts was inadequate because it did not study how an additional 85,000 car trips would affect two local freeways.
However, she ruled in favor of the county and developer on the issue of noise impacts.
The environmentalists said the impact report did not recognize that even small increases in noise could, when added together, cause even more problems for an area already plagued with noise.
Judge Waters disagreed.
