SOHO Challenges San Diego’s Preservation and Progress Project
Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO) has challenged the City of San Diego’s approval of profound changes to its historic preservation program without environmental review required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The San Diego Superior Court action seeks an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process to address adverse environmental impacts to historic resources posed by the City’s proposed Preservation and Progress project.
The city approved “Package A” of the project without analyzing the potential environmental impacts of weakening protections for historic resources across San Diego by modifications to the Municipal Code and General Plan.
“Historic places are an integral part of our environment and shared city identity,” said Bruce Coons, executive director at SOHO. “CEQA requires the City to carefully study and mitigate the impacts of proposed major policy changes. That did not happen here and adverse consequences to San Diego’s historic resources will be irreversible.”
SOHO contends that the city relied on past EIRs that it failed to supplement for the project’s substantial changes affecting historic neighborhoods and cultural resources citywide.
The changes targeted by SOHO would allow the San Diego City Council to exercise political discretion to overturn historic property designations granted by historic experts on the City’s appointed Historical Resources Board and adds policies affecting emerging historic districts, including Ocean Beach.
SOHO also challenges the City’s segmentation of Preservation and Progress project into phases— “Package A” and a forthcoming “Package B”—when CEQA instead requires environmental impacts and mitigations for all parts of the project to be studied and approved together as the “whole of the action.”
If the lawsuit is successful, the city must defer consideration of the Preservation and Progress project pending compliance with CEQA in a public EIR process.
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