Judge Puts New Block in Redevelopment Plan

The city of Santa Clarita’s $1.1-billion development plan was dealt a fresh setback Friday, as a Superior Court judge tentatively ruled that the city’s earthquake recovery plans went beyond the scope of the disaster.

Judge David A. Horowitz’s unsigned review came only a few weeks after a state appeals court shot down the plan on different grounds.

City officials have vowed to appeal that ruling and seemed undaunted by the new challenge in Horowitz’s comments.

“My feeling is that the city is committed to getting redevelopment underway sooner or later, one way or another,” Mayor Carl Boyer said. “We have too much blight in the neighborhoods.”

Santa Clarita continues to suffer from the impact of $144 million in private property damage inflicted by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Civic leaders say they’ve been hampered in recovery efforts by court challenges that have stalled their redevelopment plans.

But Horowitz’s unusual eight-page statement is little more than an announcement of his leanings on the controversial issue.

It was intended to give attorneys a sense of the judge’s thinking so they could tailor their arguments to answer those questions, said City Atty. Carl Newton. “It has no effect other than to inform the parties of his preliminary conclusions,” Newton said.

But the leading opponent of the plan, the Castaic Lake Water Agency, rejoiced. “I think it would take a pretty strong argument to change his mind after reading this,” said Robert Sagehorn, general manager of the water agency.

The agency is fighting the plan in part because the city intends to use property-tax revenues over 30 years to finance the redevelopment project. The agency has a claim on part of those property taxes and says the plan would cost it as much as $850 million in lost revenue, although the city says the true figure would be nowhere near that.

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State law allows communities some latitude in dealing with disasters like earthquakes, but the powerful water wholesaler has claimed that the city went too far and challenged the city’s earthquake recovery plans in two court cases.

It won the most recent round on Dec. 21, when the state’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that the city sidestepped environmental laws in its earthquake recovery and redevelopment plan.

The agency has argued that the city’s plan went far beyond earthquake recovery, a point with which Horowitz appeared to agree.

Santa Clarita, the judge declared, “presented substantial evidence that earthquake damage had occurred in the city. However, instead of limiting itself to redevelopment of an area which was in need of redevelopment as a result of a disaster, it added . . . significant cost and redevelopment to achieve goals that had nothing to do with the disaster, or the effects of the disaster.”

Water agency officials seemed particularly delighted by Horowitz’s statement, written in capital letters, near the end of the document.

“There is no substantial evidence in the administrative record to support the adoption of the Santa Clarita Redevelopment Plan,” Horowitz wrote.

City officials, though, say the ruling is constructive, and will help them focus as they continue their fight.

Said Boyer: “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”