Start over, judge tells Monterey County in Rancho Cañada Village lawsuit.

It’s a complicated boxing match that’s been going on in Carmel Valley for 10 years, with round after round of blows between the Carmel Valley Association, the developers of Rancho Cañada Village and Monterey County.

The latest round ended April 24, and now the judge's decision is in: the CVA landed enough body blows to win the round.

That's the ruling of Monterey County Superior Court Judge Lydia Villarreal, who handed down a decision in a lawsuit filed by the CVA in January 2017.

The suit was filed weeks after the Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 in December 2016 in favor of the 130-unit Rancho Cañada Village.

If Villarreal's decision stands up to any potential future challenges, it nullifies that vote and sends the county back to the drawing board to start all over in reviewing the development.

Villarreal rejected the supervisors’ certification of the subdivision’s environmental impact report, ruling that project description was inaccurate.

Rancho Cañada as originally proposed was 280 units, which CVA members protested. But by the time the project made it to the draft EIR stage, the county was embarking on updates to its general plan, which guides land use policies, and the subdivision had to wait.

The new general plan took effect in 2010, including changes to the Carmel Valley Master Plan that allowed for a building limit of only 266 new units total in the valley.

CVA then sued the county, resulting in a settlement that reduced that number further to 190 units.

That left Rancho Cañada’s developer, Alan Williams, with a dilemma: either start over and do the EIR all over again, or keep going with fewer units. Williams decided to push ahead, and that’s where the inaccuracies come in, according to Villarreal’s ruling.

Williams reduced the subdivision to 130 units, and subsequently worked with the county Planning Department to create a “recalculated” draft environmental impact report, with the 130-unit plan as the main alternative to the original plan, along with several other alternatives.

The main alternative was recommended by county planning staff to the Planning Commission, which approved it narrowly in a 4-3 vote in November 2016.

The end result of the changes was that decision-makers at the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors didn’t have an accurate plan to assess the consequences of their votes, and the public didn’t have the assurance that their representatives understood those consequences, according to the court ruling.

Villarreal also criticized the range of alternatives presented in the EIR, stating they were unreasonable, and did not satisfy requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act.

She also noted analysis of the alternatives was “fatally skewed,” because it was done in comparison to the original project, and not the 130-unit alternative.

The county also lost on the grounds that it broke its own its own rule about ensuring projects include 25 percent affordable housing, when the approved project only included 20 percent.

Villarreal writes that the county’s failure to amend its affordable housing ordinance in a timely manner was “an abuse of its discretion.”

In other words, county excuses for why it still hasn’t amended the ordinance almost eight years after the 2010 General Plan—which states the county must require 25-percent affordable housing in new developments—went into effect are not valid.

“The county’s delay was arbitrary and capricious,” Villarreal writes. 

She also didn't buy the county’s argument that since the economic downturn a decade ago there hasn’t been much affordable housing development, hence no need to hurry and approve a new ordinance.

The fact that there hasn’t been new affordable units built only “underscores the need for more inclusionary development,” she wrote. 

Despite Villarreal siding with CVA on the county’s failure to pass a new housing ordinance in a timely fashion, she ruled against the association on its insistence that the county create a development evaluation system within 12 months of enacting the 2010 General Plan.

Here, Villarreal agreed with the county that external challenges like lawsuits, creating more than 100 new ordinances, staff turnover and budget cuts made creating the system—which would allow the county to evaluate development specifics on a pass-fail metric—a challenging proposition.

“The county is in a far better position than this court to allocate these resources appropriately in light of other priorities and budgetary constraints,” Villarreal writes.