County of Orange v. Superior Court

We have before us a hard fought writ proceeding over, of all things, the contents of an administrative record in a CEQA case. At the behest of the project opponents, the trial judge excluded items which, as we show below, are required by law to be in that record.

We now grant the petition to require their inclusion. Petitioners have no adequate remedy at law. In CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) cases time is money. A project opponent can “win” even though it “loses” in an eventual appeal because the sheer extra time required for the unnecessary appeal (with the risk of higher interest rates and other expenses) makes the project less commercially desirable, perhaps even to the point where a developer will abandon it or drastically scale it down.

I

In Vedanta Society of So. California v. California Quartet, Ltd. (2000) 84 Cal.App.4th 517 [ 100 Cal.Rptr.2d 889 ] (Vedanta I) this court affirmed a trial court judgment to issue a peremptory writ of mandate to vacate and set aside various land use approvals for a housing development project in Trabuco Canyon. The reason for our decision was that the county board of supervisors had not certified the EIR fpr the…