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In an unpublished opinion, City of Milpitas v. City of San Jose, 2015 Cal. App. Unpub. LEXIS 8610, the Sixth Appellate District upheld the City of San Jose’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) prepared for the Newby Island Sanitary Landfill and Recyclery. The programmatic EIR assessed the impacts of: (1) increasing the maximum elevation of the landfill to increase the landfill’s capacity; and (2) rezoning the landfill area and Recyclery to conform to existing and proposed landfill activities.

The Court first determined that the document qualified as a programmatic EIR because it involved a comprehensive rezoning and because specific details about construction and operation were not available for a number of uses proposed as part of the project, requiring further environmental review.

Applying the substantial evidence standard of review, the Court rejected the City of Milpitas’ allegation that the City of San Jose utilized an improper baseline that incorporated changes proposed by the project into its assumptions. One of the three baselines considered in the EIR was the “existing conditions (as they are today on the ground, including proposed changes to existing operations).” The Court found that this baseline was appropriate because the EIR first considered the existing conditions and then analyzed the effects of the proposed rezoning at a “first-tier level of detail.”

The Court next addressed whether the impact analysis was adequate. With regard to the light impact analysis, the Court found that, as a program-level document, the City of San Jose’s analysis was proper. The final EIR expressly called for further environmental review for many uses that would be allowed by the rezoning, including expansion of landfill yard activities and construction of new structures. The structures would presumably comply with the City of San Jose’s lighting policy and design guidelines and any potentially significant project-specific impacts would be identified and mitigated as part of later environmental review.

The Court then turned to the EIR’s noise analysis. The City of Milpitas alleged that the final EIR would allow the relocation of certain landfill activities within an identified California clapper rail buffer and the relocation of such landfill activities was not properly analyzed in the EIR. The Court deferred to the City of San Jose’s interpretation of the buffer and found that the project would have no significant operational noise or vibration impacts. To the extent that the City of Milpitas also challenged the use of existing noise conditions in determining whether new uses would be substantially louder, the Court found that the existing noise levels were appropriately part of the environmental baseline.

On the odor analysis, the Court rejected the City of Milpitas’ argument that the final EIR failed to follow the air district’s significance thresholds for odor. The Court held that because the final EIR effectively treated odor impacts as potentially significant and identified mitigation measures to counteract those impacts, any deficiency in compliance with the air district’s guidelines threshold of significance was harmless. The City of Milpitas’ allegation that the EIR failed to analyze the odor impacts of increased landfill gas emissions was also rejected by the Court; the expert conclusion in the record was not contradicted by other expert evidence. The Court also rejected arguments raised by the City of Milpitas regarding volatile organic compounds and sulfur oxides because they were forfeited for failure to exhaust administrative remedies. Even assuming the City of Milpitas had not forfeit those arguments, the Court held that it had not provided any expert evidence to support its assertions on appeal.

Finally, the Court rejected the City of Milpitas’ assertion that the EIR’s project objectives were drawn so narrowly that they precluded effective analysis of alternatives to the project. The Court recognized that CEQA does not forbid site-specific project objectives and found that the site specific nature of the EIR’s project objectives did not preclude effective alternatives analysis. The Court also held that the City Council’s conclusion that none of the alternatives was feasible was supported by substantial evidence.

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