ELR Citation: ELR 20274
No(s). A122972 (Cal. App. 1st Dist. Dec 2, 2009)

A California appellate court affirmed a lower court's decision not to interject itself into a city's still ongoing process of preparing an environmental impact report (EIR) for a proposed development project. The developer wanted the lower court to issue a writ of administrative mandamus to compel the city council to certify the proposed EIR even though the council had decided that the draft EIR required recirculation to address new issues. The court rejected the developer's argument that the one-year time limit for certifying an EIR under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) constitutes an iron-clad, one-size-fits-all rule of no exception. Nor does the California Housing Accountability Act constitute a categorical or jurisdictional bar to preparation and certification of an EIR taking more than 365 days after the project's application is deemed complete. Moreover, the developer's active participation in the EIR process for more than three years—which included numerous changes in the size and composition of the project—after the date it now claims the city lost its discretionary jurisdiction amounts to laches, an accepted ground for relaxing CEQA's one-year deadline.