Sierra Club v. County of Los Angeles (Sunnyglen litigation)

(Still being editted)

CLIPI challenged a proposed residential subdivision that would intersect Santa Monica Mountains Backbone Trail. The settlement provided for the subdivision’s redesign to relocate the trail and preserve scenic views, and established the Quercus Fund to purchase open space lands throughout Santa Monica Mountains. The Quercus Fund subsequently provided essential funding to enable the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to purchase the Roberts Ranch and other highly scenic lands.

It is so much fun to bash CEQA that even in this article meant to support it, I can't help speculate on all the forests destroyed for millions of pages of junk science produced under CEQA's rubric. (Putting Environmental Impact Reports on the Web will solve this problem.) And who can avoid noticing the Biostitute profession that has grown, streetwalker wise, around developer's carnal need to find "no significant impact" in their projects.

But when the Planning and Conservation League Foundation asked me to evaluate the impact of CEQA on protection of the Santa Monica Mountains, I had to back down from my cynicism and analyze the true facts. And the facts are these: CEQA is directly responsible for protecting roughly athird of al lands that have been preserved in the twenty-five year history of state efforts to preserve open space in the Santa Monica Mountains. That is no mean accomplishment and that fact alone should cause us to re-examine the critical approach that many, even in the environmental community, have taken toward CEQA.

I was a young Sierra Club activist in law school when the California Supreme Court's Friends of Mammoth decision came down in 1972. The court said, in essence, CEQA means what ti says about evaluating environmental impacts and, yes, private projects permitted by government action fall within its purview. Suffice ti to say that CEQA, then, was seen exclusively as a way to kill projects, certainly not make them better!

Dozens of legislative amendments since then, hundreds of lower court rulings, and scores of appellate court decisions have solidified CEQA practice into a fairly predictable body of law. It is this fact that has had the unintended (by both environmentalists and developers) consequence of making projects more approvable by making them more environmentally friendly. I don't think for a moment that when CBIA, the Realtors, or the Cal-Chamber pushed for "weakening" amendments in the late seventies and eighties they had any intention of making projects better: They wanted to make them unstoppable. Likewise, my old employer the Sierra Club and other environmentalists didn't want to see incrementally less harmful developments, they were looking to keep the holes in the strainer sufficiently small so that the fewest projects possible would emerge from the CEQA process.

What has happened in reality defies the expectations of both interest groups. Would you believe that some of the most competent professional planners I know work for law firms that regularly advise developers–it is true. Oh yes, there are still those law firms out there who are notorious for advising clients to fight CEQA with every last dollar of their law firm's billings. But the members of the business community who are willing to take such advice is rapidly dwindling as the evidence piles up that CEQA is a vehicle for project approval—given a developer's willingness to accept its basic premise

So what is that magic "get out of the Planning Commission" card that CEQA offers? At its most basic, it is that projects mitigated to the maximum extent feasible, certainly as close as possible down to the threshold of environmental significance, do tend to get approved and that approval sticks in the courts.

As CEQA works itself out in highly charged development arenas, such as the Santa Monica Mountains in the heart of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area–probably the most competitive real estate market this side of Lower Manhattan CEQA–is less a vehicle for environmental impact avoidance, or at least not exclusively so, as it is an engine for mitigation of impacts. Purists seem offended by this, but from an ecological standpoint I've never understood why. Take any given area of land, add a subdivision project (even a"green" one with a semblance of jobs/housing balance) and the net environmental impact, especially in a sensitive ecosystem like Mediterranean chaparral, is going to be far greater under any development scenario than if a mitigation strategy is employed.

It is by environmental mitigation that CEQA's real benefit is felt. We have seen that a far more efficient strategy—for the developer and the conservationist—is to encourage a project to meet its economic objectives so that it can also fund a more "pure" achievement of environmental objectives by way of a compensating mitigation project. To take the Santa Monica Mountains as one example, the numbers are impressive. Since 1980 when the Legislature established the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars has been spent by Federal, State, and local sources to protect this resource. Money well spent. Real nature will abide within touching distance of one-third of Californians probably forever. Yet of the roughly 80,000 acres saved since 1980, at least 20,000 of that total was obtained as CEQA driven developer dedications in mitigation of environmental impacts identified in the EIR process at no cost to the taxpayers.

Ten years before all of Ahmanson Ranch was acquired by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for $150 million, 10,000 acres of the key north-south wildlife corridor was preserved as a mitigating condition required by Ventura County as part of the CEQA process. Los Angeles County famously (and many environmentalists would say erroneously) approved the largest housing project in its history (20,000 units) at Newhall Ranch, but not before preserving 4,300 acres of prime undisturbed habitat as the result of a CEQA mitigation measure. A contiguous habitat block of 4,000 acres of the Sierra Pelona north of Santa Clarita has been dedicated, and 3,000 acres remain to be dedicated as a result of CEQA conditions on the Ritter Ranch project. The list goes on and on. From thousands of acres down to neighborhood habitat, CEQA has worked to save land in perpetuity where the environmental impact report process has identified feasible mitigation opportunities.

Developers don't like to see these figures in print because they represent lost profits. Environmental activists don't like to see these numbers because they don't like figures that show development actually helping the environment. Legislators, taxpayers, and the great body of average citizens, however, should love these figures because they show a successful land use regulatory system that does more than churn out unread paper. Deer, bobcats, and yes, mountain lions, will pad their way through these lands forever.