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Coyote Valley debacle lurches onward
 
by Brian Schmidt

The San Jose Mercury News recently published the Committee for Green Foothills’ Op-Ed, “Best Coyote Valley Use Is Farmland — Now, Maybe Always,” where we noted that the off-track Coyote Valley planning process continues to stumble onward. The Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) that supposedly reviewed the environmental impacts overlooked many of them — especially the ones most important to open space and natural resource protection.

Coyote Valley overlook — photo by Stu Weiss

DEIR Downplays the Impact on Wildlife Migration
Take, for example, the discussion of impacts to wildlife corridors. Coyote Valley has the best crossing point to get wildlife like elk, badgers, and mountain lions between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Mount Hamilton Range. In fact it may be the only crossing point for some species.

The impact on wildlife corridors receives all of two paragraphs of discussion in the three-volume DEIR, and it is mostly dismissive and erroneous. It maintains that wildlife migration across the Greenbelt of southern Coyote Valley will be unaffected by the proposed development — as if being immediately adjacent to a city of 80,000 people will have no effect. Similarly, wildlife movement along Coyote Creek will supposedly be unaffected by the 80,000 people next door using the Creek Parkway as their primary recreation area.

According to the City’s DEIR, even ball fields full of people and lit at night will not deter reclusive animals like badgers from strolling through — maybe they will even join a pick-up game before moving onwards. The DEIR does acknowledge that increased traffic and night lighting from areas besides the ball fields will have a significant long-term impact on wildlife movement, but it does not estimate the degree of impact or identify the species that would be harmed by the impacts.

The DEIR provides only a single-sentence discussion of mitigations for the impact on wildlife migration, stating that where “possible,” points where the wildlife cross, such as street culverts, could be improved to help movement. But the DEIR does not identify the crossing points that would be “possible” to improve, or define what “possible” means — does it mean that the project would be approved even if it was found that mitigations were not “possible?”

No Protection / Mitigation for Loss of Farmland
Another example close to our mission of open-space protection concerns the loss of farmland. The DEIR seems to acknowledge that 2,400 acres of prime farmland will be lost (itself a possible undercount) and seems to indicate that loss is significant, which normally would require mitigation — if mitigation is feasible. However, tucked away in a footnote is a reference to an old memo from the City, and half-way through that memo is a declaration that only the prime farmland considered economically viable under something called “LESA analysis” would be eligible for mitigation. Digging through all this reveals that less than 2,400 acres will even be eligible for mitigation.

The DEIR also states that preserving existing adjacent farmland to mitigate for loss of farmland “is not considered by the City of San Jose as adequate mitigation under CEQA.” This seems to mean that the City was rejecting protection of existing farmland as a feasible mitigation. This reading was reinforced by the explanation in the DEIR that preservation was supposedly inadequate “because the net result of such actions would still be a loss of farmland acreage.” The City used a virtually-identical explanation to justify doing no farmland mitigation at all for the Coyote Valley Research Park proposed in 2000.

Yet City staff says it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean, and that farmland preservation is in fact a feasible mitigation for the loss of agricultural land, and the reference to preservation as not being adequate only meant that preservation, by itself, would not reduce the impact to a less-than-significant level. Confusing? More reason why the DEIR is inadequate.

Inadequate Housing for New Jobs
One last example — San Jose considered developing northern Coyote Valley in 2000 with a project that provided 20,000 jobs but no housing. The EIR that the City wrote for that project acknowledged an environmentally-significant impact on housing elsewhere in the region. The current project expects 55,000 jobs and 26,000 homes. The DEIR’s own figures on page 399 show that between 1.3 and 1.6 employed residents live in San Jose households. The math shows that 26,000 residences isn’t enough — there will be increased housing demand, and therefore unplanned sprawl elsewhere. The DEIR’s conclusion? No significant impact ’ the ratio of jobs and housing “would not displace substantial numbers of people or housing, necessitating the construction of replacement housing elsewhere.” Clearly in the DEIR, San Jose is contradicting its own math and its own previous environmental documents.

Next Steps
Opponents of environmental protection describe environmental review as a game where agencies have to jump through hoops rigged in favor of progress-fighting environmentalists. What these examples show is how the heart of the process is really about disclosure, about clearly indicating what the project’s impacts will be and what, if anything, the agency intends to do about those impacts. San Jose failed to do that with this DEIR.

We plan to point out in our comments why we feel that the language in the DEIR and the City staff’s response to our questions are both inadequate. We will not rest until the statements in the DEIR are accurate and complete. Virtually all of the flaws we describe constitute violations to the California Environmental Quality Act, although proving that in a legal procedure designed to be biased against plaintiffs would be difficult and expensive. Still, the DEIR has so many problems that a challenge might be necessary if San Jose doesn’t relent and redo the analysis.

Published Summer 2007 in Green Footnotes.

Page last updated August 27, 2007.