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TRANSPORTATION
Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP represents public entities and community groups on a broad variety of transportation issues. The firm’s work seeks to ensure that transportation planning works in a manner that protects the human and natural environment and is undertaken in accordance with state and federal law, especially the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
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On behalf of the Sierra Club, the Hatton Canyon Coalition, the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District and the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the firm successfully challenged the approval by the Federal Highway Administration, Caltrans and the California Transportation Commission of the proposed Hatton Canyon Freeway east of Carmel. (City of Carmel-by-the-Sea v. United States Department of Transportation, 123 F.3d 1142 (9th Cir. 1997).) The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the environmental review of the freeway’s cumulative impact on Monterey Pine Forest and wetlands was inadequate. The trial court ultimately set aside the agencies’ approval of the Hatton Canyon Freeway, enjoined any construction pending full compliance with the law, and approved a settlement awarding the plaintiffs substantial attorney fees. After winning the litigation, the firm assisted its clients in the subsequent administrative process, and successfully argued that state and federal resource agencies should reconsider their prior project approvals. The local transportation agency eventually voted to withdraw funding from the project. The firm was subsequently retained by the transportation agency to defend the decision to transfer funding for the freeway to another project.
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The firm represented the Ventura County community group “Save Our Somis” in successfully opposing Caltrans’ approval of a roadway project near the Town of Somis that would have added six new traffic lanes at the intersection of State Routes 118 and 34 in a manner designed to accommodate the eventual widening of State Route 118 and perhaps Route 34. The firm worked with the group to evaluate and comment on the project throughout the administrative process, first demonstrating the inadequacy of Caltrans’ proposed categorical exemption for the project. The firm later worked with technical consultants to comment on the negative declaration proposed by Caltrans in lieu of the categorical exemption and ultimately filed suit on behalf of Save Our Somis in the Ventura County Superior Court. In late 2002 the Court vacated the approval of the project, and held that an EIR was necessary to examine: (1) the increase in traffic volume due to the new intersection, as well associated environmental impacts “beginning with noise and air pollution”; (2) the project’s effects on wildlife, particularly the Monarch butterfly, about which the agency “failed to gather sufficient information”; and (3) the environmental effects of the intersection together with the Route 118 widening project.
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The firm represented Friends of Runyon Canyon as co-counsel in a challenge to the approval of a transit line extension that failed to consider effects on vegetation and wildlife. The firm participated in settlement negotiations that succeeded in securing mitigation measures to protect the water supply for plants and animals as well as funding for a technical monitor to ensure compliance.
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The firm regularly represents community groups with limited budgets on local level transportation issues. In the Oroville area, the firm drafted a comment letter in response to a plan to widen and pave an existing bikeway that would have destroyed habitat and displaced other path users. The letter exposed the plan’s legal inadequacies and led to the project’s cancellation. In Forestville, the firm’s comment letter on a proposed gravel quarry expansion demonstrated how associated increases in diesel truck traffic and emissions would have had unexamined effects on nearby schoolchildren, and helped stop the project.