Not in The Teens Anymore

By Frank Landis, CNPS-San Diego Conservation Committee Chair

As I’m writing this, everything relates to Covid-19 and we’re already tired of reading about it. I suspect it will be the same when this comes out. Hope you’re staying safe and sane. 

Switching gears, I’m still dealing with conservation issues. One of the frustrating parts of this job is that projects inevitably are sent through at inconvenient times, just to make it harder to oppose them. Thus it is that Otay Ranch Village 13 went to the County Planning Commission on April 17, with notice given and documents posted a few days before Easter. Since I’m writing this April 15, I can only speculate that, despite overwhelming testimony against it, it will pass 5-1 or perhaps 4-2 and head to the Board of Supervisors. Why? Every General Plan Amendment (GPA) Project in the last few years has followed this pattern. 

This one is botanically odious because of the scrub oaks. They want to wipe out 6.2 acres of scrub oak chaparral, an estimated 1,200 scrub oaks. In their original draft EIR they said that they looked like the rare Nuttall’s scrub oak (Quercus dumosa), but since the Jepson Manual said that species only grows within sight of the ocean, that couldn’t be it, it must be the more common Quercus berberidifolia. I went online, looked at where Nuttall’s scrub oak has been found, and found that no, the project is within the physical range of the Nuttall’s scrub oak. In the final EIR I was surprised to find that they agreed with me and changed the designation. However, they labeled it an “atypical population” and declared without further evidence that bulldozing these 1,200 rare oaks without mitigation was therefore an insignificant impact. 

Yes, steam came out my ears. Atypical populations are often critical to conservation of a species, not disposable extras. Fortunately there are ample grounds for litigation from the groups that have sued on the last projects, since the FEIR makes the same mistakes on fire and climate change as other GPAs have before it, and they’re now losing in court on precisely those grounds. That Otay Ranch Village 13 may push the Quino checkerspot butterfly into an extinction spiral is more reason for environmental groups to fight it. 

The project proposes to put a few thousand single family commuter homes just east of Otay Reservoir, along with a resort hotel to overlook the reservoir. It’s also in an area that’s burned five times in the last 125 years. It’s very much a product of its time, which was ten years ago. 

Reading the EIR again, I felt like it was 1931, and I was reading a plan from the Roaring 20s that was somehow shambling zombie-like through the approval process after the economy that would have made it viable died. Given how Covid-19 has affected the hospitality industry, who’d want to open a resort overlooking a reservoir with a bathtub ring, within earshot of all the helicopters patrolling around the border? In a sensible world they’d reject the project and tell the developer to start over again, since the project is so ill-suited to current needs. 

That’s what they did with the previous iteration Newland Sierra after all. It would be even nicer if this miserable crisis we’re going through now actually provoked developers and builders to do something decent for a change. Is that too much to hope for? We’ll see.