FRESNO - A California appeals court has found plenty of problems with a Fresno economic development plan for future growth that activists say improperly downgraded concerns over greenhouse gas emissions and decreased groundwater levels.
The Fifth Appellate District on Aug. 6 overturned Fresno Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Hamilton's ruling in favor of Fresno in a challenge brought by the South Fresno Community Alliance.
The 2021 plan said GHG emissions and decreased groundwater levels were less than significant, while impacts to air quality and transportation were unavoidable.
SFCA, a climate change activist organization, objected to nearly everything in Fresno's Program Environmental Impact Report. It claimed the plan did not comply with the California Environmental Quality Act and said Fresno failed "to complete a thorough analysis of the significant adverse impacts of [the] General plan" and included vague, nonbinding policies for GHG reductions.
Judge Hamilton said SFCA failed to challenge changes made to policy in the so-called Project Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) because it challenged it as a whole, after the time to do so had expired.
Justice Mark Snauffer and two others on the Fifth District sided with SFCA, ordering Fresno to come up with a new PEIR.
"(T)he City failed to properly describe the environmental setting, failed to substantiate its GHG analysis vis-a-vis state targets, improperly deferred air quality mitigation measures, unjustifiably found traffic mitigation infeasible, failed to analyze potential impacts on pedestrians, inadequately addressed groundwater decline, and failed to reasonably discuss project alternatives," Snauffer wrote.
Fresno's 2014 Master Environmental Impact Report starts the story, with an amendment proposed five years later based on state law that changed the metric for analyzing transportation-related impacts from level of service to vehicle miles traveled. The MEIR considered the level of development in the city predicted to occur by 2035.
The ensuing PEIR included the state metric on transportation plus updated its greenhouse gas reduction plan. Comments challenged various portions, but the Fresno City Council passed it anyway.
The PEIR said "economic and social considerations outweigh the remaining environmental effects of approval and implementation of the project." This upset SFCA, which felt environmental concerns were taking a backseat.
"To be sure, increased (vehicle miles traveled), as Fresno necessarily acknowledges, is a reasonably foreseeable effect of continuing to implement the general plan," Justice Snauffer wrote.
"The dearth of information in the PEIR explaining why VMT mitigation is infeasible at the general plan level instead of deferring that discussion to future EIRs violates CEQA."
Fresno must consider the impact of more traffic on pedestrians in its attempt to revise the PEIR, the court held.
As for groundwater, Fresno failed to show impacts to domestic wells are less than significant because of participation in the North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency, the court said.
"For example, the PEIR does not explain why no mitigation measures specifically addressing groundwater between the present and 2040 are considered," Snauffer said.
"We recognize it is possible no such mitigation is feasible but, if so, then the PEIR must adequately explain why and support that conclusion with evidence. At bottom, a conclusory statement that groundwater use will achieve balance in 2040 is insufficient to alleviate a present concern."