The two cases at issue last week were examples of that sort of CEQA abuse. The first pits the owners of the venerable El Mercado shopping and restaurant complex against developers of the proposed Lorena Plaza homeless housing development on the empty property next door. The owners want to require the developers to do a time-consuming full environmental impact study of the hazards of an abandoned oil well underneath the property. But on May 7, Judge Richard L. Fruin tentatively ruled that the developer had sufficiently studied the oil well and proposed a mitigation plan for it — and the city had properly signed off on the developer’s analysis.

Source: Los Angeles Times May 14, 2019 10:07 UTC