(CGF submitted the following comments on the proposal to put a large college campus in the middle of North Coyote Valley, a sprawl-inducing proposal that makes no sense given the collapse of other Coyote Valley development plans. -Brian)
April 7, 2008
Dr. Steven Kinsella,
Re: Comments on
Dear Dr. Kinsella;
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Coyote Campus Project (“Project”) DEIR. We conclude that
• The DEIR fails to adequately discuss effects climate change has on water availability. A Superior Court finding that the State Department of Water Resources has not established the effect of climate change on water supplies (DEIR at 133) does not eliminate the College’s obligation to discuss the potential effects to the best of its ability. The DEIR fails to discuss whether the Project might have to be closed during droughts due to the effects of climate change. This inadequate discussion that fails to identify a significant impact leaves the DEIR critically flawed.
• The discussion fails to identify whether 100-year flood plains would change as the result of climate change.
• The discussion fails to include displacement of current farming elsewhere. Other agricultural production must take place of the lost production on this land and should be included in the emission totals. The DEIR therefore substantially underestimates the Project’s climate change impacts.
• The DEIR conclusion that no individually or cumulatively significant hydrological impacts will result from the project is incorrect. Reliance on compliance with NPDES HMP standards is inadequate to justify the less-than-significant conclusion, because those standards only satisfy the “maximum extent practicable” standards of the Clean Water Act and Porter-Cologne Act, and were not designed as thresholds of significance. See the attached White Paper, “Controlling Cumulative Impacts from Impervious Surfaces,” for more information. In particular, the failure to control for hydrological impacts from storms larger than 10-year storms is not addressed by either the HMP or by this DEIR, invalidating the DEIR’s conclusions regarding hydrology.
• The DEIR’s misplaces reliance on the compatibility between the IBM campus and nearby agriculture as the reason for concluding the Project will not be incompatible with nearby agriculture. The DEIR fails to compare the number of vehicle trips and the presence of people outdoors to the IBM campus for determining whether the Project would have a larger impact. The DEIR fails to analyze cumulative impacts from the Projects and other projects to determine whether they are incompatible with agriculture. Gavilan therefore cannot rely on the DEIR’s conclusions.
• The conclusion that LESA scores show an inadequate Site Assessment scores result from a flawed analysis that understates the true agricultural value. The high land costs are irrelevant to whether the land is potentially irrigable. The water table in
• The conclusion that the Project has no growth-inducing impacts is simply wrong. The discussion fails to consider that the lack of infrastructure is the primary obstacle to further development in
to the site will facilitate additional job development in
Please contact us if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Brian A. Schmidt
Legislative Advocate,
Leave a Reply