San Franciscans For Reasonable Growth v. City & County of San Francisco

*1546 Opinion

Plaintiff, San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth (SFRG), appeals from a judgment discharging a writ of administrative mandate. That writ required the City and County of San Francisco (City), its Planning Commission (Commission) and its Board of Permit Appeals (Board), to vacate certification of Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs) and prepare Supplemental Environmental Impact Reports (SEIRs) for two projects sponsored by real parties in interest, Citicorp/Citibank N.A. (Citicorp) and Crow-Spieker #99 (Crow-Spieker). The superior court issued the writ at our direction after we concluded in an earlier opinion (San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth v. City and County of San Francisco (1984) 151 Cal.App.3d 61 [ 198 Cal.Rptr. 634 ]) that the original EIRs were inadequate because the cumulative impact analysis they contained was unduly restrictive and thus failed to comply with the purpose of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) (Pub. Resources Code, § 21000 et seq.) 1 Plaintiff appeals from the judgment of the superior court which found that in preparing the SEIRs the City had complied with the requirements of the writ to examine the cumulative impacts of these…

I agree with the majority that the SEIRs involved in this case were comprehensible to the decisionmakers. I do not believe it necessarily follows from this, however, that members of the affected public were also able to comprehend the documents. I write separately to affirm my belief that each SEIR was indeed also “readily understandable ... by interested non-professional laypersons likely to be affected by actions taken under [it],” as required by the Ninth Circuit standard we adopt (Oregon Environmental Council v. Kunzman (9th Cir. 1987) 817 F.2d 484, 494 ), and to clarify my views regarding application of that standard.

The Ninth Circuit test, like the guidelines that implement CEQA, require that the environmental impact statement be comprehensible not only to “decisionmakers” but as well to the affected public. (Cal. Admin. Code, tit. 14, §§ 15121, subd. (a), 15140.) 1 Though it is conceivable that an EIR will be incomprehensible to decisionmakers — i.e., elected and appointed government officials as well as civil servants involved in the authorization of construction projects — it is far more likely that the document will be incomprehensible, if at all, to the lay public.…