CEQA lawsuit derails 9,000-home Riverside County project

A California appeals court has dealt a blow to a nearly 3,000-acre Riverside County development, ruling that the project’s previously approved environmental analysis was inadequate.

“There are several reasons why this development concerns us, but the basic reason is simple: location, location, location,” Drew Feldmann, of the San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society, one of the groups opposing the project, said in a release. 

A representative for Lewis Community Developers, the firm behind the project, did not respond to a request for comment.

The project, called The Villages of Lakeview, is located in a rural area about 20 miles west of Mount San Jacinto, in the community of Nuevo. It’s a master-planned community that, over a construction period of decades, would dramatically transform the undeveloped area, with seven residential villages that total more than 8,700 homes and more than a million square feet of commercial space, including shops and offices. 

And like a couple other high-profile master planned communities some 160 miles to the northwest, in rural parts of L.A. and Kern counties, it has been the subject of a fierce debate that has dragged on for decades. 

An entity for Lewis Community Developers first proposed an earlier version of the project, with a bigger development footprint that included more than 11,000 homes, in 2004. Six years later the county approved the plans. But multiple environmental lawsuits challenged that ruling, and the developer later amended plans to lower the number of units. The county approved the current plans in 2017.

The latest suit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, challenges that approval and is based around concerns for the nearby San Jacinto Wildlife Area, a region that has received almost $100 million in public funds, according to a figure cited in the same release. The environmental opponents argue that the development would pave over habitat for species that include burrowing owls, hawks and kangaroo rats, and that it would devastate an important bird habitat. 

“The Villages of Lakeview development will be immediately adjacent to the most important area for birds in inland Southern California,” Feldmann, of the Audubon Society, added. “And we need a buffer zone of undeveloped land around it.” 

The appeals judge reversed an earlier decision from a county judge that determined the project’s environmental review did in fact comply with CEQA, the state’s sweeping — and highly controversial — environmental law. 

In the new ruling, the appeals judge determined that a mitigation measure in the Environmental Impact Report approved by the county was inadequate, and that the EIR “failed to address the environmental effects of supplying water to the project.” The project would require

approximately 1.5 billion gallons of water per year. 

In response to the judge’s decision, a Riverside County spokesperson told a local newspaper that the county will “thoroughly review the appellate court ruling to determine next steps.” 

The ruling last week came just a day after an L.A. County judge struck down approvals for Centennial, a master-planned development in northern L.A. County that would rank among the largest in the nation. 

Lewis Community Developers is part of the Lewis Group, a California firm that has built major projects, including master-planned communities, throughout the West.