Judge Tells Home Depot To Restart

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive Editor

A judge has told developers of a proposed Home Depot Design Center on Studebaker Road to go back to square one, and has suggested that the land might even qualify as potential wetlands.

Judge John A. Torribio issued the ruling last week, saying that an Environmental Impact Report was inadequate on a number of grounds, and voided all permits received by Studebaker LB, LLC, saying the EIR needed to be redone.

Studebaker LB, LLC, and principal Thomas Dean have tried for four years to develop property next to the AES Power Plant at Studebaker Road and Loynes Drive. It currently is home to a tank farm of mostly unused oil tanks.

AES Alamitos, the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust and University Park Estates Neighborhood Association filed the challenge to the EIR after a divided (6-3) City Council certified the EIR on Oct. 3, 2006. In addition to the court challenge, the decision was appealed at the state Coastal Commission, where it still has not had a hearing.

While the city is listed as the applicant for the EIR, Dean’s company paid the bill for the work and has been responsible for costs of responses to the appeals, according to City Attorney Robert Shannon. It would be up to Dean to decide the next step, Assistant City Attorney Mike Mais said.

Dean was unavailable for comment.

The proposal would have created a center with a 105,000-square-foot Home Depot, along with a 6,000-square-foot restaurant and 22,000 square feet of retail space. The Home Depot was touted as a Design Center with more upscale shopping available.

Environmentalists had fought the project from the beginning, saying it would impact wildlife in the wetlands across Studebaker Road both by its presence and because of the traffic it would generate. Residents of University Park Estates, diagonally across the intersection of Studebaker and Loynes from the proposed center, also opposed the project on grounds of traffic impact, while the company operating the power plant said there was not enough mitigation of potential safety problems created by the project.

Torribio agreed with appellants on virtually all counts. His ruling said it was wrong to place the burden of safety from trespassers on the power plant (AES wanted a 12-foot-high fence between the project and the plant, but the city did not make that a requirement).

On the complaints from the Wetlands Land Trust and the neighborhood group, the judge found against the developer in seven separate categories — although the traffic impact category was thrown out only because typographical errors had not been corrected.

Inadequate studies were made, Torribio said, on the impact to the burrowing owl on the tank farm site as well as sensitive plants on the site. Night lighting and noise impact on the nearby wetlands was not adequately analyzed, either, the judge’s ruling said.

Most controversial in the ruling was the judge’s opinion that wetlands delineation had been ignored, and even degraded areas were protected if there was potential for returning to a wetlands state.

“Despite respondents’ contention that the area is totally paved and developed for 50 years, a biologist reported that, ‘flat unvegetated dirt in the bottom of the basins surrounds each abandoned tank’,” the ruling says. “Photographs indicate that the berms and swales are at least vegetated.É Respondents have not conducted a delineation and there is no substantial evidence in the record to support their assumption that no portion of the project site needed to be evaluated for its potential of being wetlands.”

The EIR also inadequately studied alternatives, the judge said, including a different location for the development. Faults also were listed in the way air quality studies were done and how documents were made available for public review.

Dean also has been stalled at the state level, where the Coastal Commission staff had recommended denial of the project. The first roadblock there is a ruling that the property had been improperly subdivided without the Coastal Commission’s approval.

The state hearing has been postponed twice and now is “on permanent hold,” according to Chuck Posner, regional manager for the Coastal Commission.

While the Home Depot project has been delayed, Dean and Studebaker LB, LLC, has stayed busy. Last October, Dean purchased the Bixby Ranch Co.’s share of the Los Cerritos Wetlands. The 189 acres of property include about 40 producing oil wells.

Dean and Studebaker LB, LLC, also are owners or partners in the “Pumpkin Patch” property on Pacific Coast Highway east of the Marketplace shopping center.

Third District Councilman Gary DeLong has begun meetings with Dean to explore purchase of the wetlands and interim cleanup of the property. DeLong is conducting those talks in his capacity as chair of the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority, a joint powers authority that already has title to one parcel of the wetlands on the Orange County border and is in negotiations to purchase other parcels.

An attempt to purchase the Bixby Ranch property by either the city or the state Land Trust reached the appraisal point several years ago, but stalled there. The spike in oil prices put any development on hold in 2006.