2 Groups Sue to Block Golf Course, Amphitheater

Claiming state law and Ventura County planning policies were violated, two environmental groups have sued the county in an attempt to overturn plans to develop a golf course and a 16,000-seat amphitheater at Camarillo Regional Park.

Representatives of the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura and California Native Plant Society say a study to gauge the project’s environmental effects is inadequate and contains insufficient plans to remedy impacts to air quality, noise, traffic and the 320-acre park’s wetland and biological habitats.

Environmental Defense Center officials said during a Monday news conference that their goal is not to thwart efforts to build the first major concert venue in the county.

Their interest, they said, rests in protecting the open spaces and wide array of plant and animal species found in Camarillo Regional Park for future generations.

The suit was filed Friday in Ventura County Superior Court.

“It is not a question of whether Ventura County should get a venue like this,” EDC staff attorney John Buse said. “This isn’t the right [use] of this place.”

County officials think it is a perfect fit, and say the project’s benefits--offering new recreational outlets for county residents--outweigh the project’s negative impacts.

They said Monday that they are not deterred by the lawsuit and plan to forge ahead with design and construction plans. Groundbreaking could occur as early as December, with a goal of opening the amphitheater for the summer concert season.

“We haven’t seen the lawsuit yet, but we’re confident that it’s not going to be a problem,” said Robert Amore, the county’s lease development manager who is overseeing the project. “These lawsuits happen all the time. It’s part of the development process.”

“What they’re saying just doesn’t hold water,” he said. “That’s why we’re not worried.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs say county officials have balked at downsizing the project or finding an alternative location because their goal is to generate income for the parks system.

Two years in the works, the project is designed to generate up to $750,000 for the county each year and help create one of the only self-sufficient parks systems in the nation.

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County supervisors last year cut the annual subsidy the parks system received for years from Channel Islands Harbor, a policy that put parks officials in a scramble to transform parks into moneymakers.

County supervisors approved use permits and the project’s environmental report last month following a lengthy public hearing.

However, county officials still must obtain a federal permit through the Army Corps, which remains concerned over the project’s impact to environmentally sensitive wetlands.

To appease federal regulators, county officials redesigned the layout to reduce the impact on wetlands from about 50 acres to less than three acres.

Keeping wetland destruction to below three acres could qualify the project for a fast-track permit through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an agency charged with protecting the nation’s waterways.

But the redrawn plans were released in August, three months after the environmental impact report was released for public review.

The lawsuit contends that under the California Environmental Quality Act, the redesigned amphitheater and golf course constituted a new project. By law, plaintiffs say, that should have triggered a move to recirculate the environmental document. Instead, county supervisors approved the document a month later.

“Nobody--neither the public nor any state and federal agencies--had a meaningful opportunity to comment on the project as redesigned to deal with wetlands and habitat,” Buse said.

David Magney, the California Native Plant Society’s conservation chairman in Ventura County, said the environmental study contained incomplete surveys of the park’s plant habitat, and inadequately addressed the impact of car exhaust fumes on a federally threatened plant found in the park, the dudleya veritye.

Car exhaust, he said, chokes lichen that serve as a nursery for the plant’s seedlings. Without the mossy nest, the plant, which grows about 8 inches high with flowers the size of a dime, cannot reproduce.

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The park is one of just three places in the world where the dudleya veritye is found, Magney said.

Meanwhile, EDC officials argue that the traffic, noise and air quality impacts on the people of Camarillo would be as severe as the project’s effects on the park’s wetlands, native plants and wildlife habitat.

Carla Bard, an analyst with the Environmental Defense Center, likens the project to putting the Hollywood Bowl along the two-lane Lewis Road, which with no freeway offramp will serve as the main artery to the new amphitheater.

“The citizens of Camarillo get no [financial] benefits from this, but they get all the impacts,” Bard said.

Representatives for the Camarillo Amphitheater Managing Partners, the group that will operate the concert venue, did not return phone calls Monday.