Judge Blocks Amphitheater, Golf Course Project

Dealing a serious blow to ambitious plans for a 16,000-seat amphitheater and golf course near Camarillo, a Superior Court judge on Tuesday ruled that the county failed to properly address the environmental consequences and must devise a better project.

The decision by Judge Barbara A. Lane effectively blocks the proposed development of the first large-scale concert venue in the county--a project promoted as a lucrative moneymaker for the ailing parks system.

The judge ordered the Board of Supervisors to set aside last year’s approval of the development permit until it has considered the project’s “adverse impacts” on wildlife, wetlands, traffic and noise.

And she told officials to address various inconsistencies in their planning guidelines before moving forward with the proposal.

“The county’s position that it can approve a project with adverse, unmitigated impacts on wetlands if it finds that there are overriding benefits that outweigh the environmental impacts is mistaken,” Lane wrote in a 30-page decision.

The ruling is considered a victory for the Environmental Defense Center and California Native Plant Society, which sued the county over what they contended was a flawed plan that did not properly deal with problems posed by the project.

Defense center attorney John Buse said he was thrilled, adding that the ruling should result in a smaller, more carefully designed amphitheater--if the project goes forward at all.

“The time we have now will allow for a better review of the whole project,” Buse said. “The county has said it could not try a smaller project because it would not be financially viable, so I don’t know where this is going.”

Steven W. Weston, the Los Angeles attorney who represented the county, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

But Robert Amore of the county’s parks and recreation department vowed to push forward with the project.

“It looks like we didn’t get what we wanted,” Amore said. “But it’s not going to stop us. We’ll do what we have to do to continue. Unfortunately, this is part of the development process.”

Supervisor John K. Flynn was more pessimistic, however. Flynn said he and other county leaders will only make a decision on whether to continue with the project after talking with their attorneys.

“There comes a time when you have to give up on things like this, and this may be the time,” Flynn said. “But I don’t know. We’re going to have to take a hard look at this. Our goal has been to raise revenues through the parks for other things that need money.”

For years, the parks department was subsidized by the county-owned Channel Islands Harbor. But in 1996, county supervisors decided to cut the financial umbilical cord and split the parks and harbor into separate departments.

The proposed concert venue at the 325-acre Camarillo Regional Park, between the Santa Monica Mountain foothills and Calleguas Creek, was seen as a linchpin in the parks department’s attempts to establish profit-making ventures.

Under the proposal, the outdoor arena and accompanying 18-hole golf course would have generated $500,000 annually for the parks system, making it one of the only self-sufficient municipal park systems in the nation.

But the project posed a number of environmental problems, such as increased traffic, noise and threats to endangered plants and wildlife.

The expected loss of habitat and traffic congestion on two-lane Lewis Road, the main artery serving the park, required supervisors to approve a so-called statement of overriding consideration, which maintained that the project’s benefits outweighed its impacts.

Environmentalists cried foul.

“We recognize the parks system has some revenue need, but we don’t think the solution is to sell out parkland to commercial interests,” Buse said Tuesday. “We don’t favor development here at all.”

In her ruling, the judge said the county failed to hold hearings on a General Plan amendment to allow for the proposed amphitheater and golf course. She said the project, as proposed, runs afoul of the county’s existing planning policies.

As for assurances by the project’s proponents that environmental concerns would be minimized, Lane said there is no strategy in place to ensure that outcome.

“The bottom line is that no one knows whether any of the traffic mitigation ‘menu’ items will work and there is no assurance of implementation of the General Plan policy requirements,” she wrote.

One of the most significant issues cited by environmentalists in their lawsuit deals with a rare plant registered as an endangered species.

The Dudleya verityi, a gray succulent with spiky leaves, is found in only four locations in Southern California. One of those is the park where the amphitheater is proposed.

The plant relies on lichen for its reproduction, and experts agree that the moss-like substance is extremely sensitive to car exhausts.

Lane found that environmental studies of the amphitheater project failed to fully analyze the potential damage to the endangered plant or the sensitive lichen.

“The county’s claim that it has adequately addressed the vehicle emissions impacts on plants with its mitigation measure is not supported,” the judge wrote.

Given input from the National Park Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, and evidence that thousands of cars will be idling outside the amphitheater before and after events, the judge said it was imperative that the county conduct a more thorough review of vehicle emissions to determine risks to the plant.

“It failed to do so,” she said.

Of the findings the judge made in her ruling, Buse said declaring that the project was out of sync with the county’s General Plan, or growth blueprint, was the most far-reaching.

“The EIR inadequacy is a very narrow issue. It focuses on Dudleya verityi, the rare plant species. But the General Plan issues are far more severe,” he said. “They’re going to require major changes to the project.”