Treasure Island EIR upheld
- Martha Bridegam
- Jul 31, 2014
- 2 min read
The First District Court of Appeal has upheld the EIR supporting a $1.5 billion development plan for Treasure Island, the man-made former World's Fair site at the middle of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The court rejected the challengers' claim that the EIR for the project should have been prepared as a program-level EIR (i.e., with subsidiary EIRs for individual projects to follow later), but that it instead was improperly prepared as an insufficiently detailed project-level EIR. The court found the substance mattered more than the title, and the actual detail in the document was enough to qualify the EIR as adequate. (Earlier in July the Sixth District similarly shrugged off the program-project distinction and focused on the facts in the San Jose Airport EIR addendum, as discussed separately in this issue. See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3526.) The project calls for up to 8,000 housing units, plus hotel, office and commercial space. It's important that, as the court noted, the EIR requires the Navy to finish its toxic cleanup work on every land parcel before transferring it to the Treasure Island Development Authority for new use. Plans to build dense housing on Treasure Island, and decisions to house poor people there in recent years, have been criticized based on concerns about incomplete cleanup of hazards left by prior military uses, from mold to asbestos to radioactivity. (See http://bit.ly/1wtS7jP and http://bit.ly/O0JZHG.)