Coalition for Los Angeles County Planning v. Board of Supervisors

(Still being edited)

Responding to the Moss court order, the LA Supervisors approved a new County general plan prepared under the Planning Department’s “crash program.” In a ruling widely described as one of the most important land use rulings of the 1970s, the Superior Court invalidated the resulting plan as conforming to then-existing zoning, thereby encouraging urban sprawl, rather than being designed to meet demanding new legal planning standards. The Court also ruled that the new plan failed to sufficiently protect open space lands, including the County’s most important “significant ecological areas” (“SEAs”). The injunction imposed development restrictions throughout 1.5 million acres in the LA County unincorporated area until a legally sufficient general plan was approved. After 15 years of litigation and two further plans were found legally deficient, the Court ultimately approved new general plan prepared under the supervision of court-appointed referee. The County’s newly adopted general plan policies, to this day, continue to phase new urban expansion according to development suitability criteria and consistent with concurrent infrastructure buildout, while continuing to provide high measures of legal protection for SEAs.

It took 15 years, but thanks to CEQA, more than 3,000 square miles in the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County were protected against ill-conceived urban expansion by a legally sound General Plan. In one of CEQA's longest running lawsuits, begun in 1972 and finally concluded in 1987, the Superior Court threw out three separate General Plans approved by the Board of Supervisors before a court-appointed referee convinced the County to approve what the referee advised the Court were "realistic standards and policies to accommodate [new urban] development and [to] discourage inefficient patterns of development." 

In 1970, the Supervisors approved the "Environmental Development Guide" to serve as the General Plan for the County's then 7 million residents, about 1 million of whom lived in the 3000 square mile unincorporated area. Under the Guide's "modified centers concept," new development to house about half of the projected population growth of 2.2 million persons over the next twenty years would be encouraged within already existing urban centers, while the other half was to be guided to proposed new "urban expansion areas" totaling approximately 173 square miles. This basic policy was designed to revitalize the County's older cities, while allowing limited new fringe development in the unincorporated area. 

In 1972, the Legislature enacted AB 1301 which, for the first time, required localities to promptly bring their zoning into conformity with their General Plans and to follow those plans in their future land use decisions. Thus, the Guide went from being an "interesting study" to a "constitution" for future land development within the County's unincorporated area, where the Supervisors have direct authority to make land use decisions. 

The Supervisors responded by ordering County planning staff to embark on a "crash program." In direct conflict with the new legislative reforms, County planners were secretly directed to prepare a new General Plan conforming to pre-existing zoning and to individual requests by certain property owners for particular treatment of specific parcels. 

Many professionals within the Planning Department were horrified by the "crash program" and by the arbitrary planning decisions that responded to the requests of politically powerful landowners. These planners undertook two key environmental studies. 

1. One, the "conflicts" study, revealed that, despite the fact that the County's twenty year population projections had just been reduced from 2.2 million to only 700,000 new residents, the "crash program" had nonetheless added another 178 square miles of urban expansion areas, fully 99 percent of which were located in environmentally sensitive resource areas (e.g., significant ecological areas and watershed areas) or hazardous areas (e.g., fire or flood hazard areas). 

2. The second, the "development suitability" study, showed that two-thirds of the areas designated for new urban expansion in the Santa Monica Mountains were the least suitable lands for urbanization. 

No attempt was made to modify the "crash program's" land use maps in light of either study, and neither study was revealed or made available to the public. Instead, the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) prepared for the new General Plan claimed to continue use of the Guide's "modified centers" concept, and asserted that the new Plan would direct new urban development to suitable areas, while minimizing hazards and maximizing environmental preservation. 

Labeling the County's Plan a "blueprint for urban sprawl," CLIPI’s attorneys launched a CEQA challenge to the 1973 County General Plan on behalf of a broad coalition of environmental and homeowner groups and professional planners. 

After a two-week trial, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David A. Thomas in 1975 invalidated both the EIR and the General Plan. According to the twenty-eight page "Thomas decision," the EIR was "simply a sterile declamation of unsupported generalities almost entirely failing to convey any factual information." The EIR should have provided a “rational appraisal" of why 178 square miles of new urban expansion were added despite the dramatic drop in the projected population growth, and why any of the urban expansion areas should intrude into environmentally sensitive lands and lands unsuitable for urban development. The EIR also should have disclosed the existence of the conflicts/suitability studies and their results. It should have disclosed that the County's actual rationale for adding the urban expansion in question was simply to meet the requests of specific property owners and to conform to pre-existing zoning. It should have analyzed alternative plans for channeling new urban expansion into "areas most suitable for urban development with the least conflict with natural resource and environmental factors." 

The County did not appeal any of these rulings. Over the next five years, Judge Thomas' injunction prevented new development within the approximately 3,000 square mile unincorporated area except in accord with strict environmental standards, while the County's Planning Department carefully revised the proposed General Plan. 

The resulting 1980 Plan created strong protections for the County's "significant ecological areas" and avoided many of the fundamental errors that the County made the first time around. But it nonetheless still contained far more urban expansion than was needed in light of the still-diminished expected population growth. The plaintiff Coalition and many others suggested that the new Plan should include a "phasing" component to channel any new urban expansion first to the areas that were least environmentally sensitive and most suitable for development. 

When the Coalition's follow-up challenge to the new Plan went to trial, then-Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Norman Epstein again ruled in its favor. Judge Epstein ordered the County to supplement its new Plan with a phasing mechanism that would permit fringe area urban development only as population demands materialized and as adequate public infrastructure (such as sewers, streets and water) became available. This phasing mechanism, Judge Epstein ruled, must include "specific standards and criteria" that would require new development to "pay its own way," as the new County Plan promised, without additional expense to County taxpayers. Shortly after the ruling, County planners presented Judge Epstein with a proposed program that they claimed met his criteria for development phasing. Following a series of rapid fire hearings, however, Judge Epstein rejected the County's latest proposal and, at the request of CLIPI's attorneys, appointed a referee to monitor the County's further compliance with his orders. 

In late 1986, the Supervisors finally approved a new Development Monitoring System (DMS). Under this system, the County agreed to undertake sophisticated computer and planning analyses to determine whether a proposed residential, commercial or industrial development project within the urban expansion areas would potentially overburden public facilities and services. County planners would keep updated information about each unincorporated community's traffic levels, classroom size and the like and would determine how they would change if a given project were approved. If DMS analysis showed that a proposed development would strain facilities, county planners would determine the cost of providing new or expanded public services and devise ways for the developers to finance them. 

In his final report to the court, Referee James A. Kushner, a Southwestern Law School land use law professor, characterized the County's new General Plan as "an extraordinarily significant achieve- ment." In April 1987, Judge Epstein brought an end to fifteen years of litigation, approving the DMS system and calling it "a forward-looking proposal that serves the public interest, that is good for the County, and good for the people of the County."