Specific Plan CEQA Exemption Helps Push Newark Project Through
- William Fulton
- Jan 31, 2022
- 4 min read
Amid all the publicity about recent housing production bills, one important tool hasn’t gotten much publicity: the specific plan. Designed to be a cross between a mini-general plan and a zoning ordinance, the specific plan can play a role in moving housing and other development projects – not least because, under a 1984 law, a specific project qualifies for an exemption under the California Environmental Quality Act if it conforms with an adopted specific plan.
That’s a lesson that the Coalition for Biological Diversity and other environmentalists learned anew recently when they challenged the City of Newark’s approval of almost 500 housing units in an environmentally sensitive area near San Francisco Bay. The environmentalists claimed the project would harm the endangered harvest mouse, even though the project as approved wasn’t nearly as big as the project considered in the city’s environmental impact report, which was prepared for an entire specific plan area.
Recently, the First District Court of Appeal ruled that Newark had acted properly in exempting the housing project from CEQA because it conformed to – and indeed was smaller than the project envisioned by – the Areas 3 and 4 Specific Plan. The court also resisted the temptation to reverse the anti-“reverse CEQA” bent of recent California court rulings, saying that sea level rise in the coming decades is not a matter for analysis in the environmental documentation for this project.
Areas 3 and 4 are located south of the Dumbarton Bridge close to the Bay. The areas include significant wetlands. The city approved a specific plan and certified an environmental impact report for the area in 2010. After the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, a wetlands advocacy group, sued and won in the trial court based on confusion over whether the EIR was a program- or project-level document, the city clarified that it was a program-level EIR and recirculated it. In 2015, the city re-certified the EIR and re-adopted the specific plan. The EIR identified significant impacts for the harvest mouse and for wetlands. The city then approved two housing projects: one in Area 3 for 386 units and one in Area 4 for 469 units, proposed by Sobrato Development and known as Sanctuary West. The second project abandoned a golf course that had been included in the specific plan and instead offered to deed much of the area to the city for conservation.