Clearing of Tract Allowed : Las Flores: Even though a judge has overturned the housing plan, the county approves bulldozing the disputed land. Preservationists vow to keep up the fight.

County officials decided Friday to allow the Santa Margarita Co. to continue clearing the site of a planned 2,500-home community, even though a judge has overturned the county’s approval of that development.

That decision allowed the company to plunge ahead with work on the Las Flores planned community. In fact, even as environmentalists who successfully brought the suit were saying they would seek a court order to prohibit further alteration of the land, bulldozers had almost finished clearing the 380 disputed acres.

On Thursday, Superior Court Judge Leonard Goldstein struck down the County Board of Supervisors’ December approval of the planned community, just south of Rancho Santa Margarita.

Officials and attorneys for both sides said immediately after the decision that they did not know how it would affect the company’s right to clear the land. The county recently granted the developer a permit to start that clearing.

Sea and Sage, the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, which brought the lawsuit, had unsuccessfully sought a court order earlier in the week to delay the work. That request was heard by a different judge.

County lawyers and planning officials spent Thursday afternoon and Friday morning comparing Goldstein’s ruling and the order from the other judge.

“After conferring with county counsel . . . we have concluded there is no basis to further modify the limited permit we recently issued to Santa Margarita Co.,” County Planning Director Thomas B. Mathews said.

Environmentalists said they believe that the clearing of the land violates Goldstein’s ruling, so they will return to court to seek to have it enforced.

“I think the county is going out on a limb by allowing them to do this,” said Ray Chandos, one of the plaintiffs. “The more damage the company does out there, the more liable they are going to be.”

Sea and Sage filed the lawsuit in January to challenge approval of the project, contending that the county did not adequately study a variety of environmental issues, such as wildlife conservation, water quality and traffic impacts.

The suit named the county government, the Board of Supervisors and the company as defendants.

In his one-page decision, Goldstein told county and company officials that he based his ruling on their failure to adequately study traffic at seven intersections. If the defendants could “hereafter provide the court with evidence that the board has adequately considered the seven deficient intersections, the court will consider recalling the writ,” he said.

Company officials and Sea and Sage representatives disagreed on whether the ruling means that the county will have to recertify the environmental impact report, a lengthy legal document that requires public hearings and a vote.

“He did throw (the impact report and approval of the project) out,” said Sea and Sage’s attorney, Roland E. Bye. “What we don’t know is to what extent they have to do it over again. But it definitely says they did not do it right.”

While the lawyers wrangled, work continued at the site. By late Friday afternoon, it had nearly been completed.

Officials in the county’s grading permit office have said Santa Margarita Co. officials apparently want to complete the work before Aug. 1, when the state Fish and Game Commission is scheduled to consider whether to add the California gnatcatcher to the endangered species list.

The gnatcatcher, a small songbird, thrives in coastal sage scrub, which has covered much of the Las Flores site.

Company representatives said, however, that while the area being bulldozed contains coastal sage scrub, their biologist’s report shows that four pairs of gnatcatchers sighted during official investigations almost a year ago were not nesting in the 380 acres bulldozed this week.