Appeals Court Rejects Sierra Club’s Suit

The state Court of Appeal has rejected a lawsuit by the Sierra Club against Thousand Oaks for the city’s handling of the 2,350-home Dos Vientos Ranch development.

The suit, filed in 1994, argued that a development agreement between Thousand Oaks and the two developers of the Newbury Park site needed to be reopened because of failure to discover the project’s potentially devastating environmental impacts.

The essence of the suit was that Thousand Oaks’ original environmental review of the project, which came before the city approved the development agreement in 1990, did not discover numerous negative effects on the surrounding area that were discovered as part of a 1994 review.

City Atty. Mark Sellers, however, argued that the city had a legally binding contract with the developers, so the issue could not be revisited after the fact because new information had surfaced.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Barbara Lane agreed with Sellers’ interpretation and rejected the suit in 1995, saying Thousand Oaks had performed its governmental duties correctly based on the information it had at the time. On Tuesday, the three-judge Court of Appeal agreed.

“Obviously, we’re happy about it,” Sellers said. “It’s consistent with my advice to the City Council and city departments that we were locked in by the development agreement, and we could not reopen the entire debate just because some people thought we should.”

Attorneys for the Sierra Club in San Francisco could not be reached for comment.

The Sierra Club also has an identical lawsuit regarding a separate portion of the Dos Vientos Ranch development that is still making its way through Superior Court. Sellers said he hoped the group would drop that suit based on this week’s ruling.

“I would think that they would abandon that issue, but you never know with them,” he said. “It makes no sense to continue with that lawsuit, in my opinion.”