Sierra Club v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency

In late January 2014, Sierra Club and the developers announced that they had entered into a settlement in which they agreed to a scaled-down version of the project.

A federal district court in California blocked expansion of a ski resort in Lake Tahoe after finding that the environmental analysis for the project failed to adequately assess the economic feasibility of a smaller proposal.  Among other things, the lawsuit alleged that the environmental impact report failed to adequately address the project’s GHG emissions.  The court rejected this and other environmental concerns, but held that the report failed to make a meaningful comparison between a smaller and larger project.  The court therefore remanded the matter to the county planning agency to redo the economic feasibility analysis.