LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday denied a community group’s appeal of a 30-year time extension for a geothermal operation’s use permit on Cobb Mountain.
In a 4-1 vote, the board denied Friends of Cobb Mountain’s appeal of the Lake County Planning Commission’s unanimous Feb. 28 vote to extend the use permit for Bottle Rock Power.
Supervisor Denise Rushing, the lone dissenter in Tuesday’s vote, had urged the board to conduct more study of the project, considering the issues residents of the area have had with the operation since the 55 megawatt power plant came back online in 2007 after a 17-year closure.
Friends of Cobb Mountain filed the appeal on two key points: that the commission filed to follow the California Environmental Quality Act or to adequately consider how the steamfield’s eventual decommissioning would be financed.
Community Development Director Rick Coel, in his overview of the appeal presented to the board, had suggested denial, maintaining that the use permit covered a “status quo” situation with no change to operations going forward.
He said Bottle Rock Power was not suggesting any operational expansion.
However, for Cobb residents and homeowners living near where the plant is located, operations as they currently are have not been properly handled and, as a result, have been an ongoing source of complaints.
Friends of Cobb Mountain Chair Hamilton Hess and another group member, David Coleman, asked the board to grant the appeal, detailing their concerns.
“Our study of these issues has not been superficial,” said Hess.
Coleman, whose family has owned property on Cobb Mountain for generations, said for him the issues began in 2008 when a neighbor complained about the plant.
He cited unpermitted grading and road building that he said has been ongoing since 2007. Coleman advocated for an environmental analysis of the property before allowing the use permit to be extended.
Supervisor Rob Brown, referring to the roads that Coleman said have been built, said he had walked the site in 2008 and recalled that they had been old fire trails.
Rushing asked for more information about Friends of Cobb Mountain’s allegations that CEQA had been violated in allowing the use permit extension.
Marsha Burch, an attorney with the Davis-based law office of Donald Mooney, the group’s attorney, referred to a five-page letter Mooney had emailed the Board of Supervisors on Monday about the permit.
Mooney’s letter noted that the planning commission based its approval of extending the conditional use permit on a determination that the extension request was “categorically exempt” from environmental review under CEQA.
He argued in his letter that the existing use categorical exemption does not apply, and that even if it did, there appear to be two exceptions to its use: cumulative impacts will result over time from successive projects by Bottle Rock Power in the Cobb Mountain area and, due to unusual circumstances, a reasonable possibility exists that renewal of the use permit will result in significant environmental impacts.
Burch said the categorical exemption “is a step that terminates environmental review, so it should be used very sparingly.”
While an environmental impact review previously completed for a Bottle Rock expansion project may adequately address the impacts of extending the use permit, because the environmental review has been terminated, there has been no discussion of whether the impacts have, in fact, been addressed, said Burch.
“This project has a lot of unusual circumstances,” said Burch, who noted a history of permit violations.
Mooney’s letter to the board also noted that the purchase agreement for the plant between Bottle Rock Power and the California Department of Water Resources, which had operated it from 1983 to 1990, required Bottle Rock to maintain a $10 million environmental insurance policy and a $5 million bond for closure and decommissioning of the plant.
That requirement was approved by the California Energy Commission’s May 2001 order approving the plant’s transfer of ownership. However, despite that obligation, Mooney said that last August Bottle Rock and the Department of Water Resources amended the purchase agreement to remove those obligations, with Bottle Rock subsequently canceling the $5 million bond.
That leaves two bonds in place should the plant close – one for $100,000 required by the Department of Conservation and one for more than $700,000 that is required under the county’s current use permit. Mooney’s letter said a 2007 estimate for plugging and abandoning the wells was at $4.9 million.
During public comment Cobb residents Robert Stark asked how the county could say that there would be no changes at the plant under the extended use permit. Brown said Stark was confusing terminology about “no change” with “no change in use,” which Stark replied was just a matter of semantics.
Randall Fung, who has been an outspoken critic of the plan, its operations and impacts on him and his neighbors, also raised concerns, among them the potential cost to decommission the power plant.
Rushing said it’s clear the geothermal industry means something to Lake County, with its jobs and revenue. She said the plant’s neighbors have dealt with heavy industry use for some time.
For those reasons, Rushing said it was important for the board to make sure it’s handling the permit appropriately.
If there was any question at all about the permit and the plant, Rushing said an initial study should be done, which she felt would be better for everyone.
Burch said that for every decision like the one the board was considering, “There is a cumulative impact associated with it.”
Those impacts may be negligible or they may be huge, she said.
“This extension has cumulative impacts,” Burch said. “The question is, have they been analyzed?”
Kristen Castaños, Bottle Rock Power’s attorney, told the board that there wasn’t anything terribly complicated about the proposed use permit extension, noting that it fits squarely within the definition of the CEQA exemption.
Castaños added that CEQA is not intended to be a paper exercise. She said evidence from a previously prepared EIR demonstrated there were no cumulative impacts for expansion or ongoing operations, and maintained that opponents of the project have offered no evidence to counter that information in the EIR.
Coleman argued that the use permit should be amended, noting that there were three amendments in the 1980s and then none since 1986.
At the end of a nearly two-hour hearing the board voted 4-1 to deny the appeal. As is procedure in appeal cases, County Counsel Anita Grant will produce findings of fact to bring back to the board for a final vote in the weeks ahead.
As to what the Friends of Cobb Mountain may do next, “We haven’t made any decisions on that yet,” Hess told Lake County News on Tuesday afternoon.
He said the group’s board has to meet and discuss the matter, but he couldn’t say when that would happen.
Friends of Cobb Mountain sued the county two years ago after the Board of Supervisors denied its appeal of the Lake County Planning Commission's December 2010 certification Bottle Rock Power’s EIR, which the group had alleged also violated CEQA.
Last May, the county and Friends of Cobb Mountain reached a settlement agreement in which the group dropped the lawsuit in exchange for Bottle Rock releasing information on its bonding requirements and leases, as well as botanical surveys, giving the group funds for groundwater testing and environmental monitoring, offering reimbursement for times when residents may need to relocate, mechanisms to address traffic problems, with the county to hire a resource planner/geothermal coordinator and reestablish its geothermal advisory committee.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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