Statement From Tejon Ranch Co. Regarding Lawsuit Filed Against Kern County Over Re-Approval of Grapevine at Tejon Ranch Maste...
January 10 2020 - 4:46PM
Business Wire
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an extremist
environmental organization headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, has
announced it has filed a new legal challenge over Kern County’s
December 2019 re-approval of Grapevine at Tejon Ranch, a master
planned mixed use residential community. This challenge was
entirely expected given the long history of CBD challenging
projects statewide that would provide much needed housing and
economic development, including projects at Tejon Ranch.
Grapevine was first unanimously approved by the Kern County
Board of Supervisors in December 2016. CBD subsequently sued and
lost on six of the seven issues it raised regarding the sufficiency
of the project’s environmental impact report. On the seventh
issue—the court ruled that there was a deficiency regarding the
internal capture rate used in the traffic study—the court ordered
the County do additional work and submit a revised environmental
impact report reflecting the court-ordered changes to the traffic
study. It’s important to note that the court said no additional
work needed to be done on the rest of the environmental impact
report as the issues raised in the original lawsuit had already
been litigated and decided.
The supplemental re-circulated environmental impact report
showing the changes to the internal capture rate analysis was
subject to full public review and comment process and was
ultimately certified by the Kern County Planning Commission and
Board of Supervisors, the later coming on December 10, 2019. Both
decisions of the Kern County Planning Commission and Board of
Supervisors were unanimous.
In this new lawsuit, CBD attempts to re-litigate many of the
issues on which it already sued and previously lost. It’s important
to note that while the lawsuit purports to challenge the
supplemental analysis of the internal capture rate that was ordered
by the court, CBD did not comment on the internal capture rate,
either in writing or at the hearings held by Kern County, prior to
raising these issues in its lawsuit. To sue again over issues that
previously the court ruled in favor of Tejon Ranch on, and on an
issue it did not even raise for consideration by Kern County, is
unconscionable and a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
It's clear that this latest lawsuit by CBD is simply another
blatant attempt to delay the development of the Grapevine project,
which will provide much needed housing and economic development to
Kern County and the region. CBD’s concerted efforts to likewise
delay Tejon Ranch’s Centennial and Mountain Village master-planned
communities, which together with Grapevine will provide 35,000 new
homes for Californians, serve to worsen our housing shortage and
drive home costs ever higher. To stand in the way of these locally
approved developments that will bring thousands of much-needed
price-attainable homes to California families is yet another stark
example of CBD’s “my-way-or-the-highway” mentality.
CBD’s intransigence is not surprising. It participated in the
negotiations that led to the historic Tejon Ranch Conservation
& Land Use Agreement that permanently conserves 240,000 acres
of Tejon Ranch—equaling 90% of the Ranch’s property, only to, after
participating in the negotiations for more than a year, walk away
from the table just before the agreement was reached.
It's worth noting that the participants in the negotiations
which included, in addition to CBD, Audubon California, Endangered
Habitats League, Natural Resources Defense Council, Planning and
Conservation League, and the Sierra Club, all indicated in advance
that the outcome of negotiations would result in some real estate
development on Tejon Ranch. In fact, it was actually
representatives from CBD who proposed the 90% conservation--10%
development ratio – only to later walk away from the negotiations.
Now, CBD says it’s opposed to conservation agreements. Clearly, CBD
would rather retain the opportunity to sue (and presumably collect
attorney’s fees as their business model to survive on the chance it
was to prevail) rather than compromising to achieve a guaranteed
positive conservation outcome.
The tactics employed by the extremists at CBD and associated
organizations to litigate, delay and obstruct, are a significant
contributing factor to the housing crisis in California. After all,
the co-founder of CBD, Kieran Suckling, has stated that a primary
goal of the organization is to inflict severe economic pain. As CBD
pursues its agenda, that economic pain is ultimately being felt by
countless numbers of Californians who find adequate housing
increasingly unavailable and unaffordable.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200110005571/en/
Barry Zoeller, Sr. VP, Corporate Communications & Investor
Relations (661) 663-4212 bzoeller@tejonranch.com
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