Center for Biological Diversity v. County of Lake

A California Superior Court found that the County of Lake failed to support its findings regarding a proposed resort development’s impacts on community emergency evacuation routes during wildfires. The court therefore ordered that the County set aside its approval of the project. The court rejected other claims that the CEQA review was inadequate, including with respect to the project’s impact on wildfire risk, which was an issue identified by the People of the State of California when intervening as a petitioner to challenge the project. (The People had cited the area’s “high susceptibility” to wildfire risk and the increasing frequency, scale, and severity of wildfires exacerbated by climate change and development at the wildland-urban interface.) The court also found that a carbon credit program added in an errata to the final EIR was not a mitigation measure upon which the County relied to make any findings in the EIR; therefore, to the extent the carbon credit program did not comply with CEQA, the court found no prejudicial error. The court also was not persuaded by the People’s argument that the County should have considered alternative locations closer to a transit stop because such locations would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The court stated: “The Project consists of high-end residential, resort, and recreational facilities. It is speculative to conclude consumers of the project will travel from out of the area by public transit.”

The California Attorney General filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the People of the State of California in a lawsuit challenging a residential and resort development in Lake County that the Attorney General argued would result in adverse environmental effects that could affect the public generally. In the case challenging a proposed residential and resort development in Lake County, the petition attached to the attorney general’s motion alleged that the project would be located in an area where the “frequency, scale, and severity of … wildfires has increased in recent years, exacerbated by climate change and by high-risk development and human activity encroaching into the wildland-urban interface.” The petition also alleged that the environmental impact report for the project failed to adequately analyze and disclose the direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts of the Project on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.