Sierra Club Vows Not to Drop Case

An attorney for the Sierra Club vowed Friday to take the group’s case against Thousand Oaks and the city’s handling of the 2,350-home Dos Vientos Ranch to the California Supreme Court if necessary.

The state Court of Appeal on Tuesday rejected the Sierra Club’s lawsuit. The group’s attorney, Stephan Volker, said he will ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision--and if it declines to do so, he will take the case to a higher court.

“We think the court made a mistake, to be blunt,” Volker said.

The Sierra Club’s suit, filed in 1994, argued that a development agreement between Thousand Oaks and the two developers of Dos Vientos 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.

“The facts cried out for further environmental review, and the law said further environmental review was required,” Volker said. “The development agreement did not insulate the city from its duties to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.”

But Ventura County Superior Court Judge Barbara Lane rejected the suit in 1995, saying Thousand Oaks had performed its governmental duties correctly based on the information it had at the time. The three-judge Court of Appeal agreed.

The Sierra Club has an identical lawsuit regarding a separate portion of the Dos Vientos Ranch development that is still making its way through Superior Court. Volker said the group will continue with that suit also.