Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay
June 27, 2025 - LOS ANGELES— A California appeals court has rejected a controversial sprawl development proposed in the fire-prone Interstate 5 Grapevine area and ordered Los Angeles County to set aside its approvals.
Thursday’s ruling in the 2nd District Court of Appeals affirms that the county violated state law by failing to thoroughly analyze and reduce climate and wildfire risk when approving Tejon Ranchcorp’s Centennial. The massive development proposes to bring 57,000 residents to a high fire-risk, remote area on the county’s outskirts.
“This is a victory for Los Angeles and California because it cautions developers against building poorly planned projects that put people’s lives at risk,” said Aruna Prabhala, senior attorney and urban wildlands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The law explicitly states that climate, wildfire and other environmental harms must be fully factored in when building a risky project of this size. I’m pleased that the court understood the real danger of allowing Centennial to be built without thorough environmental review.”
Los Angeles County supervisors approved the 12,000-acre Centennial development in 2020. The Center and California Native Plant Society sued the county for failing to thoroughly analyze the environmental consequences of the project and violating the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge sided with the environmentalists in 2021 but the developers appealed. Today’s decision affirms the lower court ruling.
“We are thrilled by today’s appellate court ruling,” said Nick Jensen, conservation director at the California Native Plant Society. “Centennial is sited on one of the state’s last remaining expanses of wildflower fields and native grasslands, habitats as iconic as our giant sequoias. Today, California has more plant species at risk of extinction than any other state in the U.S., in large part because of habitat loss and climate change. In the face of these threats and increasing wildfire severity, we know better than to develop sensitive habitats in fire-prone areas. We must do better in an era of increasing wildfire severity.”
Centennial proposes to bring 75,000 new vehicle trips a day to a rural area with already congested freeways. Today’s ruling concludes that the environmental review for the project misled the public and decisionmakers by attempting to minimize the project’s contribution to the climate crisis from increased traffic and energy consumption.
The ruling also stated that the environmental review didn’t adequately assess wildfire risk, which is a serious concern in this part of the county. Between 1964 and 2015, more than 30 wildfires larger than 100 acres burned near the project site, with four of those fires burning within the project’s boundaries.
“This court decision tells us that CEQA informs decisionmakers and protects communities,” Prabhala said. “Environmental safeguards are often attacked by developers and lawmakers but this shows we desperately need them to make new development projects better and safer.”
The Center and CNPS were represented by Michelle Black, Doug Carstens, and Sunjana Supekar of Carstens, Black & Minteer LLP and Center attorneys John Buse and Aruna Prabhala.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.8 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Source: Center for Biological Diversity
