The 22-page agreement calls for a stay in the litigation to allow the county to move forward with a proposed general plan amendment to strengthen permitting guidelines for mixed use resorts.
The developer also has agreed to make additional mitigations and pay the club $35,000 to cover attorney's fees.
County Counsel Anita Grant said the county owes no money as part of the settlement.
Matt Boeger, president of Cristallago Development Corp., said Thursday that he didn't want to comment on the settlement until he had a fully executed copy in hand.
Speaking on behalf of the Sierra Club, Lower Lake resident Victoria Brandon said, “We're delighted.”
In a 3-2 vote on March 2, the board gave the go-ahead to the Cristallago project, which would have up to 650 homes and 325 resort units located on 860 acres on Scotts Valley and Hill roads, and would include both resort and housing components, as Lake County News has reported.
On April 2 the Sierra Club Lake Group, which had raised objections to the project based on concerns including conflicts with the 2008 Lake County General Plan, filed a lawsuit against the county and Cristallago Development Corp. in Lake County Superior Court.
The suit alleged the county violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by certifying the project's environmental impact report, which the group said failed to address a variety of environmental issues and project impacts.
The Sierra Club sought in the suit to have the EIR set aside and a stay put on the project approvals, along with a request for attorney's fees and costs.
The additional mitigations for the developer include designing all residences to be solar ready and incorporating new and energy efficient building technologies, providing an access point for Lake Transit and a shuttle bus to Lakeport, incorporating the development into the county's trail system and incorporating water reuse technologies.
It also calls for additional studies on traffic, and biological and archaeological resources.
Brandon said the settlement accomplishes the group's most important objective, which was to remove inconsistencies between the Cristallago proposal and the general plan. Some of those inconsistencies pointed to in public meetings included the project's location outside of community growth boundaries.
The proposed new language for the general plan notes that mixed use resort proposals requesting increased density may be considered outside of community growth boundaries if the primary scope is resort commercial, if the projects have “substantial resort and recreational facilities” that will be available to the public and enhance the county's tourism objectives.
In such cases, developers would have to demonstrate that additional resort units are necessary to support infrastructure and public resort amenity costs for the project, with the residential component “secondary and subordinate.”
If the general plan amendment isn't processed and the developer doesn't incorporate the additional mitigations within 120 days, or if the deadlines aren't extended by mutual agreement, the suit says the litigation can resume.
The case itself didn't move far beyond the filing. Grant said CEQA legislation requires parties in such suits to try to reach a settlement.
She said that through the agreement the board has committed to considering the general plan clarifications.
“I think everyone made all reasonable efforts to resolve this in a way to address the concerns” of all parties involved, said Grant.
Brandon said the Sierra Club Lake Group and the Redwood Chapter have voted to accept the agreement, and they're just waiting for the final word from the organization's national litigation team.
“It's inconceivable that there would be a problem at that level” if the local members have approved the agreement, Brandon said.
She said the response she's gotten from the community regarding the settlement has been “overwhelmingly supportive,” which wasn't what she was expecting.
A suit the Sierra Club filed in March, a few weeks ahead of the Cristallago suit, against the city of Clearlake over its proposed Lowe's shopping center project is still pending, Brandon said.
That suit is seeking to have the city and the project developer complete an EIR instead of the mitigated negative declaration the city council approved Feb. 25.
The Sierra Club Lake Group is preparing to give the city a $5,000 check to make copies of documents needed as part of the administrative record, she said.
Brandon said the club wanted to discuss settling the case in a late spring settlement conference, offering to discuss a focused EIR. “They weren't interested,” she said, and City Administrator Dale Neiman told them they needed to drop the suit.
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