A semi truck navigates the curves through Richardson Grove State Park. | Photo via Caltrans.

###

It looks like we may have reached the conclusion of the 15-year legal battle over a Caltrans project that aims to modify a stretch of Highway 101 through Richardson Grove State Park.

In a ruling handed down March 26, a three-judge panel in California’s First District Court of Appeal affirmed a lower court’s decision to reject the latest lawsuit from conservation groups that challenged the project’s compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

Last week’s ruling effectively says that the legal dispute over the adequacy of the project’s environmental analysis was resolved in earlier cases, and any further attempts to challenge the project on those grounds are procedurally barred.

The judges make this point explicit in the final sentence of their ruling, which says, “The CEQA battle has come to its end.”

The Richardson Grove Improvement Project, as Caltrans has dubbed it, will modify an approximately one-mile stretch of Highway 101 as it wends through the state park’s massive coast redwoods, some of which are more than 300 feet tall and thousands of years old.

Caltrans describes the work as “minor adjustments” that are necessary to improve traffic safety and accommodate industry-standard-sized semi trucks that are currently prohibited from passing through this narrow stretch of 101.

Project opponents, on the other hand, argued that both the construction activity and the resulting road realignment could harm the ancient trees — not by removing any of them down but by cutting into their root systems. Their initial suit argued that the environmental impact report (EIR) published in 2010 failed to properly analyze those risks, and in 2012, a federal judge agreed, ordering Caltrans to redo a couple major elements in the report. 

This was just the beginning of a “litigation odyssey” that proved to be “about as labyrinthine as the root systems of the redwood trees themselves,” as the latest appellate court ruling poetically observes. 

Caltrans redid the deficient sections of its EIR and prepared addenda and recertifications in 2017 and 2023 as the legal challenges kept coming. In 2019 Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Kelly Neel ruled that Caltrans had not followed proper procedure because it hadn’t recirculated its revised EIR for public comment. 

After the agency went back and did so, the court “discharged” (closed) the previous rulings, giving Caltrans the green light to proceed with the project. But the appellants, including the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), the Center for Biological Diversity, Californians for Alternatives to Toxics and others, appealed yet again, arguing that the environmental review was still deficient.

But in this latest ruling, the appellate court concluded that this dispute had already been resolved by the trial court, whose ruling was final and unappealable. The Latin legal term for this is res judicata, meaning “claim preclusion” or “a matter judged.”

Even if that weren’t the case, though, the appellate court said the plaintiffs’ underlying argument “lacks merit.”

You can read the full decision, linked below.

###

UPDATE, 2:36 p.m.:

Shortly after this story was published, Caltrans sent along the following statement:

The Richardson Grove Improvement Project is intended to make minor targeted improvements along about one mile of U.S. 101 through Richardson Grove State Park so standard STAA trucks can travel through the corridor, which is important for goods movement on the North Coast.

No old-growth redwoods will be removed by the project. As part of early efforts, Caltrans recently completed time-sensitive tree work ahead of nesting bird season. Only younger, newer-growth trees of various types were marked and removed in preparation for construction, and all tree removals planned for the project are now complete.

Because of the setting, Caltrans plans to use methods such as hand digging and air spades to help reduce impacts on old-growth redwood root systems. A certified arborist analyzing project impacts determined that limited root disturbance would not have a significant impact on appearance, stability, and continued health of the old-growth redwoods in Richardson Grove.

The project has been the subject of more than 15 years of litigation, involving many hours of work by our legal team across multiple rounds of court proceedings.

More project information, including visual simulations, is available on the project webpage, and Caltrans District 1 will continue sharing updates on social media as appropriate.

###

DOCUMENT:

###

PREVIOUSLY