A California appeals court handed a victory to conservationists fighting a proposed gated community that would bring more than 700 luxury homes to Lake Tahoe’s northern rim — the latest chapter in a 22-year battle between the landowner and those who want the forested area to remain undeveloped.
The state’s Third District Court of Appeal said this week that Placer County’s review of the so-called Martis Valley West project was inadequate because Sierra Pacific Industries, which owns the land, didn’t disclose the impact the development would have on traffic in Lake Tahoe, according to SFGATE.
Sierra Pacific’s proposal also didn’t “reasonably account” for how increased traffic brought by the project could affect the lake’s water clarity and air quality, the court ruled.
“Hopefully what we’re showing in Tahoe is that when reckless development projects threaten places we love, we can work together to protect them up and down the range of the Sierra Nevada,” Tom Mooers of Sierra Watch, an environmental nonprofit that fights development in the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range, told SFGATE.
Sierra Watch, the League to Save Lake Tahoe and Mountain Area Preservation teamed up on a lawsuit to void Placer County’s environmental impact report on the project, which its board of supervisors approved in 2016.
The court’s ruling marks the latest development over the fate of a forested ridgeline along Lake Tahoe’s northern rim, the “last piece of the conservation puzzle,” Mooers said. It also strengthens an emerging precedent in which the courts appear to be holding developers more accountable for their impact on the region’s environment and roadways, following a ruling last summer in favor of Sierra Watch in its suit against a new ski village, hotel and water park in North Lake Tahoe.
Placer County’s environmental impact report on that project “never discussed the importance of Lake Tahoe or its current condition,” the court said, adding that the county didn’t make relevant information related to the report publicly available during the development review process.
Sierra Pacific and local conservation groups have been at odds since the timber company initially proposed redeveloping a 7,000-acre parcel near the Tahoe basin in 2000, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That project called for more than 6,000 homes on forest land, leading Sierra Watch, the League to Save Lake Tahoe and Mountain Area Preservation to mount an opposition campaign focused on paring it down.
The company eventually shrunk the project to 760 luxury homes and seven acres of commercial real estate on a 600-acre piece of the parcel, the rest of which would be preserved as open land. Conservationists and Placer County’s planning commission still opposed the project, citing traffic concerns, which they said would complicate evacuation efforts in the event of natural emergencies. It would’ve added almost 4,000 daily car trips to Tahoe’s roads and pumped carbon emissions into the basin, according to its environmental review and its opponents.
The county’s board of supervisors nonetheless voted against the commission’s recommendation to kill the development, approving it in a 4-1 decision. A county judge in 2018 declined to block the project in response to a lawsuit against the board’s vote, saying its environmental impact report satisfied its critics’ overall concerns, even though it didn’t adequately address emergency evacuation procedures, the Chronicle said.
[SFGATE] — Matthew Niksa
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