The California Supreme Court has agreed to review Mission Village, a 4,055-home phase of Newhall Land’s planned 21,000-home Newhall Ranch community west of Interstate 5.
The decision comes on the heels of the high court ruling last month that sent the entire Newhall Ranch project back to the drawing board for new greenhouse gas estimates and river encroachment permits.
A separate, ancillary lawsuit challenging the Mission Village phase was already in the pipeline and had been going in the developer’s favor when the high court went the other direction in the main case.
Located south of State Route 126, the Mission Village phase would include a mix of residential, commercial, and non-residential uses, including 4,055 residential homes, 1.56 million square feet of mixed-use commercial space, an elementary school, a fire station, a public library, a bus transfer station, parks with a variety of sports fields and playgrounds, open space, natural habitat preserves and trails.
The county Board of Supervisors approved Mission Village in October 2011; it was subsequently litigated by several environmental groups including Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment. The groups lost at the lower court level, and the appeals court upheld the lower court ruling in September.
Now the state Supreme Court has agreed to look at Mission Village primarily for water availability and conformity with the county’s Development Monitoring System.
A Newhall Land spokeswoman said the company had no comment at this time.
In its Nov. 30 ruling, the Supreme Court held that the entire Newhall Ranch project lacked sufficient evidence on greenhouse gas emissions and did not adequately protect the endangered unarmored threespine stickleback. It also ruled that the plaintiffs weren’t given ample time to review the project.
The addition of 21,000 housing units and other buildings through the Newhall Ranch project would add 269,053 tons per year of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, according to the court.
“These decisions will help bring statewide attention to the fact that land use patterns as well as building and transportation efficiency must change if we are ever to get greenhouse gases under control,” SCOPE President Lynne Plambeck said of the November ruling. “Non-point source and point source pollution generated by inefficient urban sprawl are major sources of greenhouse gases. As the carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, projects like these should at least require substantial mitigation to reduce such impacts or no longer be an option.”
The ruling took into account not only the various Newhall Ranch phases but also all past approvals, current development projects and probable future projects to determine the full impact the Newhall Ranch development could have on the environment.
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8 Comments
Are you kidding me…and just how do they think they will get to their new homes….skateboard…the traffic is ridiculous now…can you imagine once this opens…oh…let’s not forget the water that we do not have going to this project..
Don’t forget all them homes/apartments they are building in Canyon country by the wash.
Interesting that the News decided to use a different picture than the one they used from the EIR the last time that shows all the oil well pads. SCOPE also opposed this phase because an old oil field is not a good place for residential housing.
we used a stock image of Mission Village because this was about Mission Village. The story about the “whole project” lawsuit ran in November with the appropriate stock image.
Henery Mayo Hospital is the only hospital in Santa Clarita ,so with all this extra land and more people why not build another Hospital to acomadate more people.Having a 2 Hospital would help the crowding of traffic.
Last time I checked we are in a SERIOUS drought. Where exactly will these 4,055 homeowners (and their families consisting of about 12,000 people) get their water??
Same goes for the total 21,000 homes in the development (80,000 more people.) If Sacramento and LA County really gave a hoot about the drought they would stop ALL such development. This is absolutely insane.
Where did quality of life revolve around 20,000 more McMansions and cookie cutter corperate stores? NLF is a insatiable beast bent on turning the SCV into another overbuilt SFV, SGV, etc. accompainied by the social problems that that brings.
Little noticed a while back, the California Supreme Court decided it would review the appeal of the County’s approval of Newhall Ranch’s 1st phase, called Landmark. So the slate could be wiped completely clean.
The “bad guys” are frantic. They have filed 2 “Petitions for Rehearing” of the November 2015 Supreme Court decision on greenhouse gases, endangered fish and the rights of Native Americans to due process under NEPA, since the Fish & Game EIR was also a Federal Environmental Impact Statement.
Side bets are being taken on whether individual California Supreme Court Justices can be bribed, or if favors given to their family members can make any difference.
In other news, Wall Street was quaking last Friday and Monday when a “mutual fund” which invested in junk bonds cut off its investors and went into liquidation. The manager of that fund is Third Avenue Management LLC, the same investment management bank that Newhall Land bragged about attracting as an investor when it came out of bankruptcy in 2009.
Third Avenue’s real estate fund, called Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund, is not the one which collapsed, and Newhall Land only forms a small part of that fund’s portfolio.
But keep your eyes peeled folks because Third Avenue Managment is an “activist investor” whose founder and eminence grise Marty Whitman has been seen at court hearings, Board of Supervisors hearings, and Regional Water Quality Control Board hearings involving Newhall Land. Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund claims to have invested $28.8 Million cash in “Newhall Intermediary Holding”, but under Wall Street accounting, they’ve valued that investment at $109.98 Million on their current books. http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TAREX:US
Third Avenue Managment is supposed to write a quarterly report to its investors in the Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund. The next report is due to come out in January 2016. It will be interesting to see if they write about the goings-on at the California Supreme Court.
Google Martin Whitman, aged 89, and watch for a very unhappy version of him at local government agency meetings near you. He and his Board of Directors fired Third Avenue Management’s President last Friday 12/11/15.
And while you’re googling, go to Third Avenue Management’s website, and type “Haddad” in their search engine. You’ll see a Newhall Land related executive bloviating about the wonders of real estate investments.