This Is a Challenge to City’s Passage of “Package A”
Today, March 24, Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO) will file a lawsuit against the City of San Diego which challenges the City’s approval of profound changes to its historic preservation program without the required environmental review by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This is about “Package A” which many OBceans are now familiar with.
SOHO’s suit in San Diego Superior Court “seeks an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process to address adverse environmental impacts to historic resources posed by the City’s proposed Preservation and Progress project,” as SOHO stated in an announcement today.
Here’s the balance of SOHO’s announcement:
The City approved “Package A” of the project without analyzing the potential environmental impacts of weakening protections for historic resources across San Diego by modifications to the Municipal Code and General Plan.
“Historic places are an integral part of our environment and shared city identity,” said Bruce Coons, executive director at SOHO. “CEQA requires the City to carefully study and mitigate the impacts of proposed major policy changes. That did not happen here and adverse consequences to San Diego’s historic resources will be irreversible.”
SOHO contends that the City relied on past EIRs that it failed to supplement for the project’s substantial changes affecting historic neighborhoods and cultural resources citywide.
The changes targeted by SOHO would allow the San Diego City Council to exercise political discretion to overturn historic property designations granted by historic experts on the City’s appointed Historical Resources Board and adds policies affecting emerging historic districts, including Ocean Beach.
SOHO also challenges the City’s segmentation of Preservation and Progress project into phases—“Package A” and a forthcoming “Package B”—when CEQA instead requires environmental impacts and mitigations for all parts of the project to be studied and approved together as the “whole of the action.”
If the lawsuit is successful, the City must defer consideration of the Preservation and Progress project pending compliance with CEQA in a public EIR process.
Click Petition for Writ of Mandamus to see.
I have seen it time and time again. Government agencies, including some I have worked for, try to get around the CEQA process. When I see things like this attempt to avoid CEQA for Package A, I hope that the agencies never learn. Every time they try to get away with using an older, perhaps insufficient environmental document, someone will take them to court, as they should.
Yes, the CEQA process is a pain but ultimately it will not stop a project. Not doing an adequate CEQA document and ending up in court is a great way to have your project delayed, if not derailed. Just look at Midway Rising. I hope the City never learns, and keeps stumbling over its own feet, although I decry the waste of taxpayer dollars that will ensue.
Disclose your bad facts, offer mitigation measures and make findings of overriding consideration for impacts that cannot be mitigated. Easy peasy.
The City Attorney should resign. This is yet another example of blatant legal malpractice. The City Attorney is required by law to advise the City Council & the Mayor on the legality of proposed actions in an effort to avoid public expenditures & prevent needless and costly litigation. Our communities are burdened by the need to file lawsuits that should never need to be filed had the City Attorney provided sound legal advice to City Hall. The City Attorney is not the City Council & Todd Gloria’s personal Roy Cohn.
Carelessly wasting taxpayer funds on litigation the result of bad legal advice at the time of the worst fiscal irresponsibility in our City’s history in order to provide free legal representation on behalf of corporate developers to knowingly defend il-conceived, self serving, unlawful legislative actions is not in her job description.
Any San Diegan could logically surmise that the staggering cost of defending dozens and dozens of lawsuits over Todd Gloria and Jen Campbell’s terms in office have cost the taxpayers an amount equal to almost double the current budget shortfall.
Has anyone analyzed the increase in staff at the City Attorney’s office? Every lawsuit is a requirement for more lawyers, unless they just make decisions and contract it out to friends in outside law firms. The city counts on the people who filed running out of money — a consistent strategy that does work. The City Attorney’s office approves every decision put in front of the city council, giving them a logical reason to vote YES, a foredrawn conclusion. Then the lawsuit is filed, and there are multiple “closed-door” sessions. Is this democracy?