Environmental activists have succeeded in persuading a state appeals court to slap the brakes on new San Diego County policies that the county had said would help speed up the development of thousands of new affordable homes in the region and help address California's housing availability and affordability crisis.
On March 27, a three-justice panel of the California Fourth District Court of Appeal sided with two environmental activist organizations, the Cleveland National Forest Foundation and the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, against San Diego County.
In the decision, the appellate court agreed with the activist groups that the county had not lived up to its responsibilities under California's controversial Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by enacting policies that would allow developers to move ahead with certain kinds of housing projects without conducting costly transportation studies and other regulations which often slow or demolish new housing development plans.
The dispute dates back to 2022, when San Diego County approved new "guidelines for new development in unincorporated communities."
Those guidelines included a new "Transportation Study Guide" which was based largely on the presumption that developers constructing so-called "infill" housing, subject to conditions, would not increase vehicle emissions.
According to the county, the guidelines would no longer require so-called "Vehicle Miles Travelled" (VMT) studies and mitigation, as required by California's SB743 law, so long as the proposed housing was built in "unincorporated areas where cars would travel at least 15% fewer miles than the average of all drivers in the entire county."
The county said the new guidelines would essentially allow developers to move ahead with increasing the availability of homes in the region, making housing more affordable, while not exacerbating so-called "climate change" and air pollution.
In announcing the changes, the county said the new guidelines would "reduce the cost and streamline the review and consideration process for 'infill and vehicle-mile-traveled-efficient' development in areas that have higher housing densities and are nearer to roads, jobs and transit."
The county also exempted from VMT review any "residential or office project that is expected to generate fewer than 110 automobile trips."
The changes, however, were immediately challenged by the two environmentalist groups, who asserted the new Transportation Study Guide fell short under the CEQA law, as amended by SB743.
In announcing their lawsuit, CNFF and CERF said the county was actually incentivizing developers to build new homes in "areas where VMT is already high," allegedly resulting in more emissions and worsening the effects of "climate change."
In a statement accompanying the announcement, CNFF's Director Duncan McFetridge said the guideline changes amounted to San Diego County "thumbing its nose" at the CEQA law and SB743, as he said the county was "doubling down on sprawling, car-centered development."
The county prevailed in San Diego County Superior Court, where Judge Joel R. Wohlfiel ruled the county's new guidelines were "consistent" with the law and a state technical advisory "and that the methods and assumptions the County used to define it constituted substantial evidentiary support."
On appeal, however, the Fourth District court disagreed, saying the county has failed to present enough evidence from sources other than its own analysis to support the conclusions ensconced in its guidelines concerning the effects of "infill" and small developments.
"The County has chosen to identify specific areas as infill where development can occur without performing a VMT analysis, but it has done so without providing any evidence that developing infill, as it has chosen to define it, would generally result in an insignificant transportation effect at the local county level," the justices wrote.
Concerning San Diego County's "small development" standard, the justices added that statements by the county "make clear there was no effort by the County to develop any evidence that small projects generating 110 or fewer trips are likely to cause a less than significant transportation effect in San Diego County.
"This burden is not an onerous one, but it must be addressed," the justices said.
The opinion was authored by Justice William Dato. Justices Truc T. Do and Julia C. Kelety concurred in the ruling.
CNFF and CERF were represented in the action by attorneys Marco A. Gonzalez and Livia B. Beaudin, of Coast Law Group, of Encinitas.