A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Thursday, March 11, eased the path for a land-swap deal between the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority and an oil company moving forward, ruling against an environmental group that sought to invalidate the trade by arguing the California Coastal Commission did not follow its own rules when approving the agreement.
The judge ruled that California Coastal Commission officials did not abuse their authority and that the Puvunga Wetlands Protectors, which asked the judge to nix the deal, did not exhaust all of the administrative remedies available to challenge the state agency’s approval.
Attorneys for Puvunga Wetlands and the California Coastal Commission did not immediately return requests for comment.
Puvunga Wetlands filed what’s known as a “writ of mandate” against the California Coastal Commission 18 months ago after the state agency approved a deal that would see Beach Oil Minerals, LLC, restore and transfer to the authority 180 acres of wetlands it currently owns in exchange for moving its operations behind the pumpkin patch east of the Marketplace shopping center.
The oil company is the largest landowner in the wetlands, which were originally a tidal marsh but have long been degraded by human-caused environmental factors, including oil drilling. The land swap is part of the authority’s efforts to eventually restore the more than 500 acres of wetlands, which are in Long Beach but border Orange County.
The authority — a joint-powers agency with representatives from Long Beach and Seal Beach, the state Coastal Commission, and the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers and Mountains Conservancy — discusses that land swamp in the final draft of conceptual plans for the wetlands restoration work, which is currently under public review.
Puvunga Wetlands Protectors is a nonprofit that was apparently formed specifically to challenge the land deal.
That group argued that the California Coastal Commission violated its own regulations by improperly using a provision in state law that allows the agency to override any potential environmental consequences related to a proposal.
Puvunga Wetlands, however, “failed to exhaust administrative remedies,” the judge wrote in her ruling, “with respect to their contentions that Commission improperly delegated duties to its executive director and deferred analysis of numerous Project conditions.”
The group’s legal challenge had other procedural problems, the judge ruled.
But even then, the judge said, Puvunga Wetlands “did not show a prejudicial abuse of discretion” by commission leaders.
The draft plan for the wetlands restoration, meanwhile, will be under public review until March 25. After that, the authority’s board of directors will eventually vote on whether to certify the plan.
Once certification occurs, officials will develop restoration plans for specific wetlands areas, which will each require analysis of potential consequences related to the proposed work, called an environmental impact report. The authority’s board certified the conceptual plan’s environmental impact report in January.
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