Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge v. City of Newark

Two environmental groups filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court alleging that the City of Newark violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved a residential project along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay. The petitioners asserted that new information about the rate of sea level rise combined with more detailed information about the project’s design showed that impacts would be more severe than was disclosed in an environmental impact report prepared in 2015. The petition also claimed that the City did not consider the impact of sea level rise in combination with the project on available habitat for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse and that the City had improperly deferred mitigation by relying on future adaptive management measures to mitigate impacts from sea level rise.