A's Stadium Wins A Round In CEQA Lawsuit
- William Fulton
- Sep 5, 2022
- 2 min read
The Oakland A’s have won a legal round in their battle to build a new baseball stadium near the Port of Oakland and Jack London Square, but they now face a new legal challenge from truckers, longshoremen, and others opposed to the stadium.
Three separate lawsuits had been filed against the project challenging the environmental impact report for the project, including one from Union Pacific, one from the Capitol Corridor rail authority, and one from a coalition of opponents including longshoremen and truckers who use the adjacent port. But Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman – the same judge who kicked up a huge storm in the Berkeley enrollment EIR case a few months ago – ruled in favor of the City of Oakland and the A’s on a wide range of CEQA issues, including greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
The only CEQA issue on which Seligman ruled against the A’s was wind impacts. While acknowledging that the wind impacts could not yet be determined because the stadium design has not been finalized, Seligman ruled that the wind mitigation measure adopted by Oakland doesn’t contain any performance standard. But officials said the wind issue is “pretty manageable.” On other issues, Seligman said the EIR conducted a detailed analysis of greenhouse gas emissions and ruled against the plaintiffs’ argument that the GHG mitigation was impermissibly deferred.