Environmental groups on Friday sued the county of San Diego over its handling of rules for backcountry development in the Cleveland National Forest — underlining the heated debate about how best to meet a growing population’s housing needs while limiting gas-guzzling commutes that contribute to climate change.
The Sierra Club, which filed one of the suits, contends that the county has improperly rezoned private lands within the 440,000-acre forest, setting the stage for property owners, particularly those east of Alpine, to subdivide lots and usher in a wave of rural development.
The Cleveland National Forest Foundation took the other legal action against the county Friday. Its co-founder Duncan McFetridge said the region needs new housing development, but that projects should be limited to urban areas close to major job centers.
“In the age of diminishing resources, climate change, drought, to argue that you need to grow in a national forest, which is the only continuous wildlife habitat left in San Diego, is based on a monstrous lie about growth and politics,” he said.
The lawsuits come amid broader, ongoing legal wrangling between the Sierra Club and the county over whether any large backcountry development projects should proceed before the Board of Supervisors adopts an updated climate action plan. A draft of that document is due out this summer.
The county was forced to revamp a 2012 version of its climate blueprint after the Sierra Club won a lawsuit against it in 2014. In the case, which went all the way to the state Supreme Court, the environmental organization asserted that the county didn’t include specific and enforceable strategies to reduce climate emissions.
The county has maintained that its approach to rezoning development of private lots in the national forest is proper despite the lack of a revised climate plan because environmentally, there are no significant impacts expected.
The county counsel and Supervisor Dianne Jacob, whose District 2 includes much of the East County area in question, declined to comment about pending litigation.
Travis Lyon, a commercial real estate broker and chair of the Alpine Community Planning Group, which supports the county’s rezoning strategy, also didn’t want to weigh in for this story.
Citing the region’s serious housing shortage, Matt Adams, vice president of the Building Industry Association of San Diego, blasted the lawsuits as undermining the rights of property owners.
“Why do these groups feel that they alone should dictate how private property should be zoned?” Adams said. “It’s not how we’re supposed to do things. For them to file suit is an example of how the process is inherently flawed.
“You need to identify areas where it’s important to build in the unincorporated just as in the urban areas,” he added. “We don’t have enough (housing), and what’s out there costs too much, and litigation like this doesn’t help the situation.”
Friday’s lawsuits are set against a landscape of cities, counties and transportation agencies up and down California grappling with the state’s increasingly aggressive push for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. Environmental groups have tried to capitalize on that Sacramento-led momentum, pressuring municipalities to adopt comprehensive strategies for fighting global warming by, for example, maximizing use of renewable energy, better promoting mass transit and favoring denser neighborhoods as a way to limit urban sprawl.
When conflicts end up in court, green groups routinely accuse local government officials of failing to support the state’s climate strategies with clear and legally binding policies. One of those cases — the Cleveland foundation suing the San Diego Association of Governments — is pending before the state’s highest court.
On the specific issue of backcountry development, the Sierra Club’s new lawsuit focuses on the projected effects of climate change while the Cleveland foundation also alleges that environmental impacts associated with the loss of open space, fragmentation of animal habitat, wildfires, water quality and air pollution weren’t properly addressed.
On Dec. 14, the County Board of Supervisors approved a general plan amendment that will change land-use designations for more than 71,000 acres within the Cleveland forest. The amendment is set to take effect this month.
Lot sizes in this woodlands territory had been capped at 40 acres, per a 1993 citizens’ initiative spearheaded by McFetridge. That measure, called the Forest Conservation Initiative, sunset in 2011, opening the door for county officials to change the zoning to appease property owners who have longer wanted to further develop their lots.
More than half of the proposed density identified in the county’s amended plan is concentrated just east of Alpine and south of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians’ reservation and casino, an area that hugs Interstate 8 to the north and south for about three miles. Some residents and tribal leaders have pushed hard of late for increased density along this section of freeway.
The changes will greenlight mixed-use commercial and residential buildings in certain sections, as well as up to one dwelling unit per acre in others.
There are currently about 3,800 private parcels in the national forest. By comparison, the amendment approved last month will allow up to 6,245 parcels, including roughly 3,560 in the Alpine area.
Before the Forest Conservation Initiative restricted growth, as many as 15,094 units could have been built as the result of subdividing private lots. The initiative had imposed a cap of about 4,300 lots, including approximately 1,180 in the Alpine community.
Conservation groups have argued that the initiative’s expiration didn’t automatically revert the private lands to the old zoning standards, but rather simply opened the door for county officials to consider changes as allowed under state environmental laws.
County officials have disagreed, saying the old zoning kicked in as soon as the initiative ended. Under this premise, they have said the land-use designations adopted in December actually constitute less density. The dispute over that issue is a notable component of the lawsuits filed Friday.
At the supervisors meeting last month, Jacob defended the new zoning as moderate compared to the pre-initiative designations.
She also questioned the idea that growth around Alpine would encroach on sensitive habitat. “I don’t think that most people think that Alpine is in the forest,” Jacob said at the meeting. “There is a difference between the Alpine community and the rest of the (private lands in question), which is part of the forest.”
The Sierra Club has been monitoring a number of large backcountry projects slated for development. The rezoning of private lands within the national forest is the first of those projects that county officials have allowed to move forward since being forced to overhaul its disputed climate plan, said attorney Josh Chatten-Brown, who is representing the Sierra Club in its litigation against the county.
“The Sierra Club’s ultimate goal is for the county not to approve additional large-scale development in [previously open spaces] until the climate action plan is in place,” Chatten-Brown said.
“We have not discussed whether the Sierra Club would be challenging each and every project because that could be extremely difficult and costly, but we have challenged the first one and we’ll have to look at each additional one,” he added.
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Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.com
