A proposal that would bring oil trains through Monterey County will be decided in court.

A plan that would bring oil trains rolling through Monterey County appears to have waned, but the tale has taken a curious twist.

On March 14, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors voted 3-1 to deny the proposed Phillips 66 rail spur project that would allow delivery, by rail, of crude oil to its refinery in Nipomo.

In doing so, the supervisors upheld the Planning Commission’s Oct. 5, 2016 denial of the project – in a 3-2 vote – and ended more than a year of SLO County hearings on the subject.

But before the supervisors were even presented with a choice of whether to uphold or overturn the Planning Commission’s decision, Phillips 66, on Oct. 19 of last year, took the matter to court. The company argued the county did not follow the right process when it determined that environmentally sensitive habitat areas existed on the proposed project site.

The company asked the court to halt county hearings until litigation was completed, but San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge Barry La Barbera ruled March 7 that the company must first attempt to resolve the issue out of court – which included its appeal to the supervisors, and if they lost there, to the California Coastal Commission – before litigating the decision in court.

When the supervisors upheld the Planning Commission’s decision a week after La Barbera’s ruling, Phillips 66 had a new deadline of April 14, 2017 to file an appeal with the Coastal Commission. They did not.

Phillips 66 spokesman Paul Adler writes by email that the company is “instead proceeding with the lawsuit that was filed.”

It’s a strategy that is baffling to Alicia Hoessler, an attorney with Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, which is among the parties in the lawsuit.

“I’m not sure what they’re doing,” she says. Hoessler says she’s confident that the one claim in Phillips 66’s lawsuit that remains before the court – an argument that a SLO County land-use law is unconstitutionally vague – will eventually be dismissed.

The next court hearing is scheduled for July 3.