Update on the Legal Challenge to Uptown Community Plan
The new community plan will allow new buildings up to 100 foot tall or higher in the commercial core area of Mission Hills.
As many of you know, Mission Hills Heritage (MHH), with co-petitioner SOHO, filed a lawsuit against the City of San Diego this January over the Uptown Community Plan Update.
Last November the City Council adopted a last minute re-write of the Uptown Community Plan that had been in the making for over seven years. Only days before the City Council voted, the Planning Department threw out land use maps that had been developed through years of community input and replaced them with maps based on the old 1988 plan. Similarly, the environmental analysis underpinning the project was hastily recrafted to fit the revised plan without properly analyzing and addressing that plan’s numerous, unmitigated impacts on the community. And in an unprecedented move, the Planning Department ignored extensive recommendations from Uptown Planners, the City’s officially recognized community planning group for Uptown.
The resulting community plan will invite irreparable damage to the character of Mission Hills. MHH’s primary concerns include that the new community plan will allow new buildings up to 100’ tall or higher in the commercial core area of Mission Hills, and that the new plan includes no timetable for processing potential historic districts identified many year ago for the Mission Hills neighborhood.
The lawsuit is a petition under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to challenge the environmental analysis underlying the Uptown Community Plan Update. Preliminary attempts to settle the action have not succeeded, and the action is moving into the briefing phase, with a possible hearing next spring. Please consider contributing to help defray the cost of the lawsuit. For more details, visit www.MissionHillsHeritage.org.
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