A Summary of Published Appellate Opinions Under the California Environmental Quality Act

In 2015, the California appellate courts continued to chart new ground as they grappled with some of CEQA’s most difficult and controversial questions. The  Supreme Court of California led the way, issuing four opinions on hotly contested issues. For the first time, the

Newhall Ranch, a proposed mega-development in Los Angeles County, can’t seem to catch a break: besieged by setbacks since Newhall Land first filed an application to develop the land in 1994, the project has been the subject of over twenty-one public hearings and several law suits over its more than twenty year history. In Center

The California Court of Appeal’s Fourth Appellate District’s recent decision, North County Advocates v. City of Carlsbad is a potentially major decision on the issue of using historical levels of operations as the baseline for gauging the environmental impacts of a proposed project under CEQA. In this case, which concerned renovation of a large Westfield shopping center in Carlsbad, the court upheld the city’s use of a traffic baseline that assumed an existing department store building was fully occupied, even though the store had been vacant for almost six years at the time the draft EIR was released. North County Advocates v. City of Carlsbad, Fourth Dist., First Div., Oct 9. 2015.

Background

The shopping center Westfield sought to renovate was built in 1969, with five anchor department store buildings and numerous smaller retail shops, including a now-vacant Robinsons-May department store. Under the terms of an existing precise plan for the shopping center, Westfield was entitled to renovate the interior of the former Robinsons-May store and fully occupy it without obtaining discretionary approvals from the city. The development plan the city approved for renovation of the center, however, included the demolition and reconstruction of the former Robinsons-May store.

City’s Analysis

In its analysis of traffic impacts, the city’s EIR, completed in 2012, assumed full-occupancy of the former Robinsons-May store, which had been vacant since 2006, three years before the city began work on the EIR. The EIR and supporting documents explained this baseline was appropriate because the “nature of a shopping center is that tenants change and the amount of occupied space constantly fluctuates” and that portions of the space are periodically occupied with temporary uses. The EIR also noted that the new building would not increase the square footage allowed under the precise plan and that the vacant space could be reoccupied at any time without further discretionary action. It also pointed out that the full occupancy assumption comports with SANDAG’s regional traffic modeling methodology, which assumes full occupancy of all entitled square footage.
Continue Reading Historical Level Of Use May Serve As CEQA Baseline For Replacement Of Vacant Building

Opponents of the Sacramento Arena project took another shot at halting the new Kings arena project, challenging the city’s certification of the project EIR on a variety of grounds. But the Court of Appeal upheld the city’s certification of the EIR, rejecting every one of the opponents’ arguments.  Saltonstall v. City of Sacramento, 234 Cal. App. 4th 549 (2015).

The Project

The Sacramento Kings have played in Sleep Train arena, located in the Natomas area of Sacramento, since it opened in 1988. In March 2013, an investor group presented a plan to acquire the Sacramento Kings, construct a new downtown arena in partnership with the City, and keep the team in Sacramento on a long-term basis. The city council approved a preliminary nonbinding term sheet for development of a new entertainment and sports center in downtown Sacramento at the site of the Downtown Plaza. In 2013, the National Basketball Association approved the sale of the Kings to the investor group, reserving the right to acquire and relocate the franchise to another city if a new arena was not opened in Sacramento by 2017.

To facilitate meeting this deadline, the Legislature amended CEQA exclusively for the downtown arena project to expedite the environmental review process. The legislation also specifically allowed the city to prosecute an eminent domain action for the arena site prior to completing CEQA review.

Consistent with these accelerated deadlines, the city engaged in an expedited review process starting in April 2013. In January 2014, the city council adopted a resolution to acquire the site for the new arena by eminent domain and, in May 2014, certified the final EIR and approved the project.

Project opponents promptly sued, challenging the constitutionality of state legislation that modified several deadlines under CEQA. The court of appeal rejected the opponent’s constitutional challenge to the state CEQA legislation. Undeterred, opponents filed this second action challenging various aspects of the CEQA review performed for the project.
Continue Reading Court Rejects Another Attempt to Stop New Kings Arena

The California Supreme Court has agreed to review the appellate court decision Cleveland National Forest Foundation v. San Diego Association of Governments. As we previously reported, the court of appeal in that case invalidated the EIR for the San Diego Association of Government’s 2050 Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy.

In its petition

The California Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited decision in Berkeley Hillside Preservation v. City of Berkeley, No. S201116 (March 2, 2015). The Court’s decision clears up some of the ambiguity that has surrounded the standard of review for challenges to CEQA exemptions under the unusual circumstances exception. In doing so, the Court rejected the controversial approach taken by the court of appeal and instead opted for a middle ground, balancing the interest in giving effect to the legislatively-mandated exemptions against CEQA’s overarching goal of ensuring review of significant environmental effects.

Background

The project at issue was a large house to be built in the City of Berkeley. The city granted a use permit and found the project exempt from CEQA under the Class 3 (construction and location of limited numbers of new, small facilities or structures) and Class 32 (in-fill development) exemptions. The city also determined that none of the exceptions to categorical exemptions listed in CEQA Guidelines section 15300.2 were triggered, including the exception for a “significant effect on the environment due to unusual circumstances.” An organization sued, alleging, among other things, that the exemptions were barred by the unusual circumstances exception.

The court of appeal overturned the City’s exemption determination, holding that the possibility that a proposed activity might have a significant effect on the environment “is itself an unusual circumstance,” barring reliance on a categorical exemption.

A Potentially Significant Environmental Effect Alone Is Not Sufficient to Trigger the Unusual Circumstances Exception.

The California Supreme Court reversed and remanded, holding that a party bringing a challenge under the unusual circumstances exception must establish both 1) that there are unusual circumstances that justify removing the project from the exempt class; and 2) that there is a reasonable possibility of significant environmental impacts due to those unusual circumstances.

The Court began by examining the text of section 15300.2, which provides: “A categorical exemption shall not be used for an activity where there is a reasonable possibility that the activity will have a significant effect on the environment due to unusual circumstances.” According to the Court, the plain language of this provision supported the view that there must be some showing of unusual circumstances for this exception to apply. The court of appeal’s interpretation would, the Court found, render the phrase “due to unusual circumstances” mere surplusage.

The Court further found that under the court of appeal’s interpretation, the categorical exemptions would have little, if any, effect. The Court noted that under CEQA section 21080(c) and (d) and Guidelines section 15061(b)(3), when there is no substantial evidence that an activity will have a significant effect on the environment, “further CEQA review is unnecessary; no CEQA exemption is necessary to establish that proposition.” Thus, under the court of appeal’s interpretation, the categorical exemptions would serve no purpose, applying only when the proposed project is already outside the scope of CEQA review.
Continue Reading California Supreme Court Upholds Most Commonly Used CEQA Categorical Exemptions

The Northern District of California has struck down part of San Francisco’s rent control ordinance as an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment in Levin v. City and County of San Francisco, Dist. Court, ND California 2014, No. 3:14-cv-03352-CRB (N.D. Ca Oct 21, 2014). The case may have important implications for monetary exactions in local land use permitting.

At issue in Levin were the relocation payments required by the 2014 amendments to the San Francisco rent control ordinance. Under the ordinance, owners of rent-controlled property were required to make certain payments for tenants evicted under the Ellis Act. Under the 2014 amendments to the rent ordinance, in order to withdraw the unit under the Ellis Act, property owners were required to pay the greater of the lump sum required under the original ordinance or an amount equal to twenty-four times the difference between the unit’s current monthly rate and the fair market value of a comparable unit in San Francisco.

Plaintiffs, owners of rent-controlled properties in San Francisco, filed suit, bringing a facial challenge against the 2014 ordinance as violating the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the 2014 ordinance constituted an exaction that violated the Takings Clause. The court first held that the San Francisco ordinance, which demanded monetary payment from the property owners in exchange for a permit to remove a unit from the rental market, had to satisfy the Nollan/Dolan requirements of essential nexus and rough proportionality. Next, the court found that the ordinance could not meet either of those requirements. Both steps in the court’s analysis may prove important in future cases involving monetary exactions.

Extending the reach of Nollan/Dolan

The Nollan/Dolan standard constitutes a special application of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine to the government’s land use permitting power. The Nollan and Dolan cases specifically applied to adjudicative land use exactions involving a government demand for property owners to dedicate an easement as a condition of obtaining a development permit. The central concern in these two cases was that the government may use its substantial power in land use permitting to pursue governmental ends that lack an essential nexus and rough proportionality to the effects of the proposed new use of the property.

The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District expanded the reach of Nollan and Dolan to monetary exactions. Because of the direct link between the government’s demand and a specific piece of real property, the Court held that the central concern in Nollan and Dolan was implicated and application of the standard to monetary exactions was appropriate.
Continue Reading Federal Court Invalidates San Francisco Tenant Relocation Requirements

In a long-awaited 2-1 decision, a court of appeal overturned the environmental impact report for the San Diego Association of Governments’ 2050 Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy. Cleveland National Forest Foundation v. San Diego Association of Governments (4th Dist., Div. 1, No. D063288, Nov. 24. 2014).   The most remarkable ruling, in what is likely to be viewed as a highly controversial decision, is the majority’s finding that the EIR was deficient because it did not assess the plan’s consistency with the 2050 greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal contained in an executive order issued by the Governor in 2005.

Background of the Plan and SB 375

The decision concerns SANDAG’s Regional Transportation Plan which contains the Sustainable Communities Strategy required by SB 375. When it enacted SB 375, the Legislature recognized that cars and light duty trucks emit 30% of the state’s greenhouse gases. Accordingly, SB 375 required the Air Resources Board to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets applicable to cars and light duty trucks for each of the state’s metropolitan planning regions. The initial targets set goals for the years 2020 and 2035. SB 375 requires the Air Resources Board to consider new targets every eight years. The targets set for the San Diego area required a 7 percent CO2 reduction by 2020 and a 13 percent reduction by 2035.

In addition, the Legislature recognized that to achieve these targets, changes would need to be made to land use patterns and policies. For this reason, SB 375 also required Regional Transportation Plans to include land use-related strategies for achieving the targets, called Sustainable Communities Strategies. The SANDAG Regional Transportation Plan was the first in the state to be adopted with a Sustainable Communities Strategy.

The plan, however, drew fire. While it showed greenhouse gas emissions reductions through 2020, it also showed increases in greenhouse gas emissions after that date. Project opponents argued this was inconsistent with SB 375’s goals, the policy in AB 32 requiring that emissions reductions achieved by 2020 be maintained past that date, and an executive order targeting larger scale emissions reductions by 2050.

EIR’s Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In 2005, Governor Schwarzenegger issued an executive order establishing statewide targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions that included reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.  The EIR found that SANDAG’s plan would reduce greenhouse gas emissions until 2020, but would increase them in later years.  While it discussed the 2050 emissions reduction target in the executive order, it did not treat the order’s 2050 emissions reduction target as a standard for assessing the significance of the plan’s greenhouse gas impacts.

The court’s majority agreed with the plan opponents held that the EIR’s greenhouse gas impacts analysis was inadequate for failing to analyze the plan’s consistency with the executive order. While the executive order was not a legislative enactment, and established only statewide rather than regional emissions reduction targets, the majority reasoned that the executive order led to later legislation that  “validated and ratified the executive order’s overarching goal of ongoing emissions reductions,” and therefore the executive order continues to “underpin the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout the life of the transportation plan.”  According to the majority, the absence of an analysis comparing the plan with the executive order’s 2050 emissions reduction target amounted to “a failure to analyze the Plan’s consistency with state climate policy.”
Continue Reading EIR For SANDAG’s Regional Transportation Plan Rejected By Court Of Appeal

In Citizens for Restoration of L Street v. City of Fresno, an appellate court affirmed that the substantial evidence test, not the fair argument test, governs an agency’s determination whether buildings or districts should be treated as historical resources under CEQA.

Background

This case concerned a proposed residential infill development project in the City

On September 25, Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill No. 52, which creates a new category of environmental resources that must be considered under the California Environmental Quality Act: “tribal cultural resources.” The legislation imposes new requirements for consultation regarding projects that may affect a tribal cultural resource, includes a broad definition of what may be