San Diego City Council voted unanimously Tuesday, March 27, for a clarification to the August 2006 motion to approve the Regents Road bridge, adding language that calls for a new environmental impact report to be compiled before the project is built.
The decision was viewed as a victory by the environmental groups Friends of Rose Canyon, San Diego CoastKeeper and the San Diego Audubon Society that had filed suit against the city alleging that it had violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by approving the project in Aug. 2006.
“We have won an important victory,” Deborah Knight, president of Friends of Rose Canyon, stated in a press release from the group, which was founded three years ago to protect the natural resource. “We are not fooled by City Council’s face-saving spin. Our lawsuit has forced them to rescind their approval of the bridge project and the previous EIR and start over.”
Although the Regents Road bridge has been planned for many years and is part of University City’s community plan, the project came to the forefront after the city conducted a three-year North/South University City corridor study to find ways to relieve traffic congestion between the two portions of the neighborhood.
Widening Genesee Avenue was one alternative that was struck down by the council as a viable option. City staff must prepare an EIR in order to evaluate the impacts of removing the option from the community plan.
But the council’s intention for Tuesday’s decision was to clarify the 2006 vote and add language to compile a new EIR before construction, said Pam Hardy, representative for Council President and District 1 Councilman Scott Peters.
The document approved last August was a program and not a project EIR, Hardy said. According to CEQA definitions, a program EIR is developed to analyze a series of actions that can be characterized together as one large project, compared with a project EIR that analyzes a specific, detailed smaller action.
The programmatic EIR outlined the worst-case scenario for a bridge connecting south and north University City. A different bridge design will now be analyzed to compile a project EIR, Hardy said, adding that the city hopes to have the new draft completed within the next six months.
“The motion made in August was to move ahead with the Regents Road bridge, and this motion clarifies that that includes doing a full project EIR,” she said. “Friends of Rose Canyon seems pretty happy. I think they wanted to know that the specific project will be tested, and it will. This is similar to what they were seeking, and we don’t expect any further litigation.”
Although the environmental groups involved have gained the resolution they sought, the city’s spin on the EIR approved last year is not accurate, according to Rachel Hooper, lead attorney for Friends of Rose Canyon.
After the council approved the EIR in August, it filed a notice of determination with the county, which is a standard process when a CEQA project is approved, Hooper said. The resolution in August also gave Mayor Jerry Sanders authority to take action in building the bridge, she said.
“The [August 2006] EIR itself says it’s a project EIR,” Hooper said. “There’s no question what they did. There’s nothing in the first resolution about doing another EIR. That’s just a reinvention of history.”
The new resolution states that the city must rescind its prior approval of the project and cannot proceed with implementation of the project until a new EIR is completed, which was the overall goal of the lawsuit, Hooper said.
“I think it’s good news for the community and for the environment that they’ve decided not to rely on the prior EIR but instead have committed to doing an adequate one,” she said. “Once they are seriously informed, they might take a new look at the project, and I’m not so sure that they will approve. The city will have to take note of what is disclosed in this new EIR, and it’s going to have to look at alternatives as a requirement of CEQA.”
For more information, visit www.sandiego.gov/cityattorney, click on resolutions and ordinances and specific field-search “Regents Road Bridge,” or visit www.rosecanyon.org.