Santa Clarita Valley leaders have been working on the area's long-range growth plan for a decade, ever since city and county officials kicked off their "One Valley, One Vision" effort with much fanfare at a community pancake breakfast on Super Bowl Sunday in 2001.
This week, the planners absorbed their first bone-crunching tackle.
In a letter sent Thursday to the Los Angeles County planning office, California Attorney General Kamala Harris said the latest environmental impact report on the Santa Clarita Valley Area Plan violates state law because it proposes inadequate steps to limit air pollution caused by increased vehicle traffic.
The county had reacted to previous comments by the attorney general's office by making changes in the original EIR.
Even with those improvements, Harris wrote, the report "concludes that the (growth) plan will increase air pollutant emissions, worsening an already critical public health threat, but fails to discuss and analyze feasible mitigation."
Thus, she said, the report fails to meet the requirements of the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act.
City of Santa Clarita senior planner Jason Smisko downplayed the impact of Harris' objection, calling it "a normal part of the process" of gathering comments from public agencies and the public itself.
The environmental concerns will be addressed as the plan is revised, Santa Clarita and Los Angeles County officials said.
Elaine Lemke, a principal deputy county counsel, said the county is "disappointed" that the attorney general's office publicized its letter with a news release.
"I think it's kind of unprofessional to address the issues in the press rather than directly with the (county planning) office you've been working with," Lemke said.
The One Vision plan is a combined effort of county and local officials, residents and businesses to create a blueprint for land use and development in the Santa Clarita Valley.
At the kickoff event 10 years ago, Santa Clarita Mayor Laurene Weste stood with county officials and declared: "It's about time that we've begun reading from the same hymnal."
The community north of the San Fernando Valley is best known as home of the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park in Valencia.
The 200-square-mile Santa Clarita Valley also is home to about 250,000 residents.
Under the plan, that number would grow to more than 450,000 by 2035. And with all that new housing and commercial construction, vehicle emissions of ozone-producing nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons would double.
The result, the EIR said, would be the worsening of a "severe, health-threatening air pollution problem" in the Santa Clarita Valley, where ozone levels exceeded California standards on 81 days in 2008.
"Yet, rather than proposing land use changes that reduce the need to drive in the Valley, the (One Vision) plan will result in a 120 percent increase in existing driving trips," wrote Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney who was elected the state's attorney general in November in a close race against Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley.
The increase in vehicle trips would outpace the 75 percent population increase projected by the EIR, Harris noted in the letter co-signed by Deputy Attorney General Susan L. Durbin.
Harris' letter called the environmental policies outlined in the EIR "unenforceable or vague," and said the document fails to provide enough information for the public to judge proposed growth strategies, plans for affordable housing and commuting patterns.
A Harris spokesman said environmental groups have raised similar objections.
Smisko said the Santa Clarita blueprint is drawing particular attention because it is the largest growth plan in the works in California, and coincides with the state's adoption of tougher greenhouse-gas emissions standards.
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