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After a lengthy legal battle with a neighborhood group that organized to protest a redevelopment project slated for the Market Place shopping center, the project approved by the San Ramon Planning Commission more than three years ago could be coming closer to fruition following an appellate court ruling last week.
After hearing from both sides on April 23 in a San Francisco courtroom, judges for the First Appellate District Court upheld the Contra Costa County Superior Court’s ruling in favor of the city and developers for the project and affirmed that the respondents were eligible to receive reimbursement for a majority of the legal fees assessed in the prior order from Citizens Against Market Place Apartment Development (CAMPAD).
DanvilleSanRamon did not receive comment from city officials as of publication time and attorneys for CAMPAD had not responded to a request for comment.
The appeal stemmed from a Contra Costa County Superior Court judge’s ruling on two lawsuits from CAMPAD that were filed against the city and property owners TRC Retail after the Planning Commission approved an application for a mixed-use development project.
The project would demolish more than 50,000 square feet of existing commercial space in order to construct 40 single-family detached condo units and four ADUs at the site of the centrally located San Ramon shopping center.
The first of those lawsuits was filed in October 2022, ahead of the city’s approval of the project in February 2023. The second was filed shortly after the city council held a public hearing and rejected an appeal from the group in the ensuing months, with the two cases combined in June 2023.
The combined lawsuits challenged the city’s categorization of the project as being exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act and sought to overturn the city’s approval of the project, arguing that its approval was inconsistent with San Ramon’s General Plan.
They also argued the city requires a master plan be prepared for a project of the significance and scale of the Market Place redevelopment plan and that the primarily residential project failed to classify under the city’s mixed-use designation.
Both the trial court and the appellate court disagreed with those arguments, with the latter contending that the master plan language in the city’s policy was “amorphous and aspirational,” that the project fell within the city’s mixed-use zoning policies, and that city had not made an error in determining the project to be CEQA exempt.
Ultimately, the appellate court noted that city officials have more discretion in determining the consistency of local policies and applying them accordingly than CAMPAD had argued, pointing to precedent in case law including a state supreme court ruling earlier this year in a case brought forward by Save Livermore Downtown against the city of Livermore over its planned Eden Housing project.
“We review the city’s decision approving a housing project for abuse of discretion, deferring to the city’s consistency finding ‘unless no reasonable person could have reached the same conclusion,'” appellate court judges wrote in last week’s opinion.
The burden of proving that no reasonable person could have reached the same conclusion in the city’s consistency finding is on CAMPAD, according to the appellate court, which ruled that they failed to fulfill that burden of proof and that the project was consistent with the objectives of the city’s general plan.
“The project would redevelop part of an aging strip mall into housing, which is an explicit goal of the general plan,” appellate court judges wrote. “It includes features-such as demolition of vacant buildings and construction of new driveways, pedestrian crosswalks, and sidewalks that address the general plan’s objectives to improve circulation, access, and visibility within the Marketplace Center site as well as the neighboring commercial site.”
“The city thus concluded that, overall, the project is consistent with the general plan,” they continued. “Citizens fails to persuade us that no reasonable person could agree.”
The appellate court also upheld the trial court’s decision to award the city $38,568 in record preparation costs, ruling again that the burden of proving that the city had abused its discretion in calculating those costs was on CAMPAD, and that the group had failed to provide such proof.
“Citizens has not included the city’s memorandum of costs, which categorizes the various costs sought, in the appellate record. Instead, it cites the parties’ briefs filed below,” the appellate court ruled. “Thus, Citizens cannot demonstrate an abuse of discretion in the amount of costs the trial court awarded because it fails to provide an adequate record for review.”
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