Carmel Valley development headed for approval, and then court.

Another Carmel Valley development project appears to be headed for approval by County Board of Supervisors without any environmental review.

On Dec. 5, the Board will hold a hearing about a plan to subdivide 218 acres of undeveloped land at Carmel Valley Ranch, a 144-suite luxury resort in the hills near Mid-Valley. The resort plans to build 12 homes there.  

Opponents say Carmel Valley Ranch (CV Ranch) lacks the water rights needed for such an expansion. In this way and others, they see a replay of the September Ranch development, approved by County Supervisors a week ago. The similarities between the new CV Ranch proposal and September Ranch would be uncanny if this scenario wasn’t so commonplace in Monterey County.

Attorney Tony Lombardo represents the applicants in both projects, which have been in and out of the courts for years. Evidence that the lawfirm has “ghostwritten” County documents has tainted both projects, as has shoddy county record keeping.

“There is a pathology of paving over problems.”

On Nov. 14, County Supes approved September Ranch by a 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Dave Potter dissenting. The same thing will likely happen on Dec. 5, when the board is slated to approve a “mitigated negative declaration” for the CV Ranch project.

The “neg dec,” as it’s called in wonk circles, means that the new subdivision will not need to prepare a full Environmental Impact Report. It is meant to streamline the process for projects that will have little impact.

So, Supes will probably adopt the neg dec. And then, like September Ranch, the project will go back to court.

And again, attorney Michael Stamp, who has won numerous lawsuits exposing the County’s disregard for environmental laws and open records, will handle the case for the development’s opponents.

“This is the textbook example of how dysfunctional county government is,” Stamp says, “how wedded they are to development at all costs.”

Carmel Valley Ranch says the water for its Land Reserve Project comes from rights it holds for a project that it abandoned almost seven years ago. In 1999, County Supervisors reviewed a project called La Puerta. At that time, CV Ranch’s attorney, Tony Lombardo, said that development would rely on water credits from an earlier project that had been cancelled on the ranch.

The board had general concerns about water rights on the property, and in January 1999 unanimously voted to require an EIR on the project. The EIR was never prepared, because in early 2000, CV Ranch withdrew the La Puerta project.

About that same time, the Monterey County Superior Court ruled that the County planning department and water resources agency had allowed Lombardo & Gilles attorneys to ghostwrite hundreds of documents in dozens of different files, including documents related to Carmel Valley Ranch.

A few years later, a new CV Ranch development, the Land Reserve Subdivision project, emerged. In the 2003 application, Lombardo & Gilles lawyers argued that the water for the subdivision would come from two other unbuilt projects at the ranch.

In return for approval to develop 12 other lots, CV Ranch agreed to put 11 into open space zoning. That was a bogus deal, Stamp says, because nine of those lots were already zoned open space.

In a recent letter to Senior Planner Luis Osorio, Stamp writes: “From the beginning, the County could not get a handle on the applicant’s claims.”

The planner repeatedly asked Lombardo & Gilles attorneys for information about the two projects that they claimed provided water rights to the Land Reserve Subdivision. One of the two was the abandoned La Puerta project.

In 2004, Supervisors approved the development. Stamp challenged the project in court, arguing that it violated the California Environmental Quality Act. He pointed to the fact that the EIR accounting for the La Puerta water source, which had been ordered by the County Supervisors in ’99, was never completed. Therefore, he argued, the County could not legally sign off on a water supply for the subdivision.

The court agreed with Stamp, and on Dec. 5, 2005, sent the project back to the Supes. The court told the County to reconsider its approval without an EIR.

“Ten months later,” according to Stamp, in September 2006, “the County released a document that does not meet the Court Order.”

In September, county planners released a new study for the Land Reserve Project. It does not mention the board-ordered EIR on water rights. In recommending that the County Supervisors adopt the mitigated negative declaration, the planners say, “The proposed project will not have a significant effect on the environment.”

Along with Stamp and his clients, the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District disagrees. On Nov. 6, the water district faxed comments to Luis Osorio, the project’s planner. “The District has concerns about water supply and water demand,” it says.

On Nov. 13, Stamp submitted a series of lengthy comments arguing that an EIR should be prepared. On Dec. 5—a year after the court’s order on the previous neg dec—Supervisors are slated to adopt the new report, known as an Initial Study, which will allow the development to move forward without further environmental review.

Supervisor Potter, who led the unanimous charge to require an EIR on the CV Ranch’s water supply in 1999, says further discussion is needed.

“[Water availability] is something that was unclear in ‘99, and the issue of the viability of water credits hasn’t been discussed,” he says, adding that adopting a neg dec would likely mean a new court order from a judge.

But Stamp and others aren’t convinced that the Supes won’t just green light the study on Dec. 5.

“There is a pathology of paving over problems, disregarding information, ignoring the water management district,  and ignoring everybody who has a concern,” Stamp says.

“The County thinks they can brush it aside, and say, ‘We don’t know; we don’t care.’ They are living in some fantasy world that is really unacceptable.”