California AG Becerra challenges housing plans in wildfire areas
SACRAMENTO >> California’s attorney general is challenging some of the state’s largest suburban development projects as local officials weigh the risk of increasingly devastating wildfires against the state’s dire need for more housing.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Wednesday backed lawsuits opposing San Diego County’s approval of environmental reviews for two projects in a very high wildfire hazard zone southeast of San Diego.
Last month Becerra, who will be switching jobs to become President Joe Biden’s health secretary, backed Northern California court challenges alleging that Lake County officials failed to properly take into account the increased wildfire risk from approving 1,400 homes, 850 hotel rooms and resort apartments and other resort amenities on the 16,000acre Guenoc Valley Ranch property.
A wildfire mitigation expert said it’s past time for the state’s top law enforcement official to step in, while the president of the state’s building association said Becerra is overstepping by questioning local officials’ safety precautions.
The Southern California projects are part of a 36 square miles Otay Ranch residential development — the largest in San Diego County’s history and nearly the size of San Francisco — that would cover highly flammable grassland, chaparral and sage with thousands of homes, parks and other amenities.
“The intervention of the attorney general is a fascinating escalation of power, effectively to force counties to do what they’ve rarely done — which is to rethink their greenlighting of any development at any place,” said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires.
Becerra’s intervention in the Lake County lawsuits was the first time Miller knows of anywhere in the nation where the state has stepped in to argue that its interests in preventing wildfires trumps the county’s interest in building more housing. That project neighboring Napa County encompasses 25 square miles in a high wildfire risk zone that has burned repeatedly in recent years as California endured its worst wildfire seasons in history.
Becerra is acting under a 2018 update to the expansive California Environmental Quality Act. The state’s Natural Resources Agency, at the Legislature’s direction, created new standards for officials to analyze whether development projects will increase wildfire risks.