Santa Ana Schools Sue Tustin to Get Land on Closed Base

Santa Ana school officials sued the city of Tustin on Thursday, saying a $200-million redevelopment plan for the closed Tustin Marine base will further burden Santa Ana’s already packed schools.

The lawsuit, which invokes the California Environmental Quality Act, comes as the cities negotiate over how much land, if any, the Santa Ana Unified School District and the Rancho Santiago Community College District will be allocated for a school on the closed base.

Santa Ana wants at least 80 acres for a kindergarten-through-college campus, an amount Tustin officials have rejected for about eight years. The disputed land is within Santa Ana’s school district boundaries, but Tustin is the local redevelopment agency for the base.

The suit, filed in Orange County Superior Court, charges that Tustin creates a wider “gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ ” by pushing a plan that gives land to schools in Irvine, Tustin and South County communities that have large non-Latino populations, while refusing to give “even one square inch of land” on the 1,600-acre base to schools with predominantly Latino populations.

The suit argues that Tustin’s environmental plan violates the Environmental Quality Act by failing to adequately address any added crowding the plan could inflict on Santa Ana schools.

Santa Ana officials say Tustin’s reuse plan for the base will add 5,000 students to their schools.

“Their reuse plan is going to create a lot of workers who are going to have to find housing in the nearest city they can afford. In all likelihood, that will be Santa Ana,” said Martin N. Burton, an attorney for Santa Ana Unified.

In a previous interview, Tustin City Manager William A. Huston disputed the numbers, saying the plan will create 500 more students at most.

The lawsuit also argues that Tustin’s redevelopment plan does not create low-income housing. Huston has said the plan’s housing element, which consists mostly of middle-income and luxury homes abutting a 200-acre golf course, will have 15% low-income housing.

Tustin officials declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday, saying their attorneys had not had time to read it.

In the near future Santa Ana could file a federal discrimination as well as the federal environmental suit. Huston has said a discrimination suit would end negotiations.