Judge halts mega-resort in California wildfire zone, says residents could die trying to flee

BY RYAN SABALOW AND

DALE KASLER UPDATED JANUARY 06, 2022 1:36 PM

Development of a $1 billion resort and housing project in one of the state’s most wildfire-prone communities has been placed on hold after a judge ruled developers didn’t adequately plan for what might happen when a wildfire erupts and thousands of people have to run for their lives.

The Lake County judge’s ruling on the Guenoc Valley Resort could have sweeping ramifications for housing and business developments across a state where fires are growing in severity and local officials are under intense pressure to approve new building projects during a housing crisis.

The ruling, under California’s powerful environmental law, also represents a major victory for environmentalists opposed to new housing and business projects in areas with extreme wildfire risks.

“The court recognized that Lake County failed in one of its most important jobs, to consider how a dangerous development in the direct path of fire can increase risks to surrounding communities,” said Peter Broderick, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

In this case, the environmentalists had a powerful legal ally. The California Attorney General’s Office joined the Center for Biological Diversity in the environmental group’s lawsuit challenging the posh Lake County resort.

In the Guenoc Valley, photographed by drone on on Monday April 12, 2021, trees grow near the scorch marks from the backburn from the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in August 2020. The valley is the site of a planned $1 billion resort and housing development in Lake County, and much of it designated by Cal Fire as highly vulnerable to wildfire. Daniel Kim DKIM@SACBEE.COM

On Tuesday, Lake County Judge J. David Markham agreed with environmentalists and the state that Lake County planners signed off on the development’s environmental documents without accounting for what would happen when a fast-moving fire erupts and the resort’s workers and guests all try to leave the area at the same time.

“A significant number of wildfire related deaths in California occur during attempts to evacuate,” the judge wrote.

Markham said developers had done a good job of attempting to reduce fire risks. That said, they hadn’t fully accounted for serious problems that could arise if a wildfire broke out. A portion of the project’s 16,000 acres burned in 2020, the worst wildfire season in modern California history.

Markham wrote that the resort could bring up to 4,070 new people to the sparsely populated area of Lake County, where the roads could be overwhelmed during a wildfire.

“These people will likely compete with residents in the surrounding area for safe evacuation routes,” Markham wrote. “The additional people competing for the same limited routes can cause congestion and delay in evacuation, resulting in increased wildfire related deaths. This is undoubtedly a situation where the Project, by bringing a significant number of people into the area, may significantly exacerbate existing environmental hazards; specifically, wildfires and their associated risks.”

Officials with Lotusland Development Holdings, the group building the Guenoc project, said they were reviewing the ruling.

“We remain committed to working alongside the Lake County community and fire safety experts to ensure this project is built in the right way to improve wildfire detection, prevention and response throughout the region,” Chris Meredith, a partner in the Lotusland project, said in a written statement.

Moke Simon, the Lake County supervisor whose district includes the project site, said the ruling was “deeply disappointing.”

“The investments proposed, including adding housing supply and even a fire station and helipad, offered the potential for lasting regional economic benefits. If the ultimate result of this decision is the project not moving forward, that will be a tremendous loss,” he said in a statement released by the county.

STATE DEBATES FIRE RESTRICTIONS

Lotusland’s chief executive, Alex Xu, told The Sacramento Bee last spring that the project would carve out “fire breaks” on the landscape, install high-definition warning cameras and take other safety measures. The first building to go up on the premises would be a fire station.

“I completely understand and respect the concerns about fire safety,” he said at the time. “If we weren’t confident in our ability to defend and prevent fires, or major wildfire events, we as business people wouldn’t be committing (to) this kind of investment.”

Lake County is one of the poorest in the state, and officials say the resort will be a major economic driver.

Located just over the line from Napa County, Guenoc Valley would bring luxury resort villas and upscale housing, along with a polo field designed by an internationally known polo star who counts Prince Harry as one of his friends. The project site would include vineyards and is part of an old country estate owned by Lillie Langtry, a famous British actress of the late 1800s.The charred remains of 2020’s LNU Lightning Complex Fire are visible as Randy Sternberg, who runs the ranching operations on the land planned for the $1 billion Guenoc Valley resort and housing development, drives through the property on April 12, 2021. The state Attorney General’s office has joined a lawsuit against the development, much of which is in a high hazard wildfire zone. Daniel Kim DKIM@SACBEE.COM

The ruling comes as state policymakers struggle to balance the state’s unrelenting demand for new housing and business opportunities, while also seeing lethal fires destroy entire communities nearly every summer.

In 2020, as some of the worst fires of the season were still burning, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 182, a bill that would have required communities approving new developments in wildfire zones to build evacuation routes and raise fees to clear flammable vegetation.

In his veto message, Newsom said the bill would conflict with the state’s goals of easing its crippling housing shortage. California has been building 100,000 to 120,000 homes a year since 2015, well short of the annual goal of 180,000 set by the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

A similar bill failed to get out of legislative committee last summer.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has suggested the state should discourage new developments in fire-prone areas by withholding state funds for infrastructure “where risk from climate disasters is too high.”

FIRE EVACUEES DYING IN TRAFFIC

Concerns about evacuation routes backing up with traffic during frantic wildfire evacuations aren’t unique to Lake County.

At least eight people died in their cars, stuck in traffic, as they tried to escape 2018’s Camp Fire in Paradise, the state’s deadliest wildfire that burned 10,000 homes and killed 85 people in a matter of hours.

Their cars burned over despite Paradise officials having conducted evacuation drills and developing fairly sophisticated evacuation plans. Experts said the reality was the routes out of Paradise were simply too few and too tiny to handle the town’s entire population fleeing at once.

Ironically, Paradise had one of the better evacuation plans in California. “Destined to Burn,” a 2019 joint investigation by the USA TODAY Network, McClatchy and the Associated Press found that just 22 percent of communities in California’s most fire-prone areas have robust, publicly available evacuation plans.

Like Paradise, Lake County is one of the most fire-prone regions in the state. Thousands of buildings have burned there in the last decade.

It was no no fluke when a portion of the Guenoc Valley development site actually caught fire during the LNU Lightning Complex, the state argued in court filings challenging the project.

Much of Guenoc Valley lies within spots designated by Cal Fire as highly vulnerable to major fires.

“Wildfires have affected the Project site throughout its history,” the lawsuit says.

The Guenoc Valley resort isn’t the first time environmentalists have filed lawsuits challenging what they consider risky developments in other fire-prone regions of California.

Invoking the California Environmental Quality Act, an environmental group got a ruling this spring that temporarily halted the 19,300-home Tejon Ranch Centennial project near Los Angeles over climate-change and fire-hazard risks. Tejon Ranch’s developers settled the case.

The developer agreed to make the project a “net-zero” community, meaning it would offset its greenhouse gas emissions by taking such steps as installing solar panels and thousands of electric vehicle charging stations. The developer also agreed to pay $500,000 each year for onsite fire reduction and provide another $500,000 in grant funding annually to reduce fire fuels in outlying communities, said Barry Zoeller, spokesman for the project.

Shortly after suing over Guenoc Valley in Lake County, the attorney general filed a similar case over Otay Ranch Village, a pair of subdivisions in San Diego County, saying the fire dangers constitute a violation of CEQA.

In October, a San Diego County judge ruled developers and San Diego County officials failed “to consider meaningfully the issue of wildfire ignition raised by the” project.

The Lake County judge’s ruling should force planners and developers “to see how absolutely crucial it is to consider evacuation challenges when building projects this risky,” said Broderick, the environmentalist attorney challenging the resort.

“No developer should be allowed to make it harder for people to escape catastrophic fires,” he said.

This story was originally published January 06, 2022 8:33 AM.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article257093052.html