In Save Our Capitol! v. Department of General Services (2023) 87 Cal.App.5th 655, the Third District Court of Appeal held that the Department of General Services violated CEQA when certain design changes to the State Capitol renovation (Project) were not revealed until the final EIR (FEIR), preventing the public from commenting on the changes. The Court also found that the EIR did not contain a reasonable range of alternatives, and the failure to provide depictions of key design changes or allow public comment led to the inadequate analysis of the Project’s impacts on aesthetics and historic resources.
In 2016, the Legislature authorized the Department of General Services and real party, Joint Committee on Rules of the California State Senate and Assembly (collectively DGS), to begin the process of planning the demolition and renovation/restructuring of the State Capitol Building Annex attached to the historic California State Capitol Building (Capitol) in Sacramento. DGS was authorized to demolish the existing annex and replace it with a larger annex building, construct a visitor center, and construct a new underground parking facility. The Project utilized a “construction manager at risk” delivery method, a concept that evolves into more detail as the development process progresses; thus, the components of the Project were not fully designed when DGS released the draft EIR (DEIR) in 2019. Even though DGS later recirculated the draft EIR (RDEIR) to reflect changes to the visitor center design, more detailed designs and modifications to the Project were not evaluated until the FEIR was released. In the FEIR, the annex’s exterior was designed to include a “glass curtain wall,” and the location of the underground parking facility was changed from south of the Capitol to east of the new annex. The FEIR also further clarified the Project’s impacts on trees and landscaping, and revised tree removal and transplantation estimates upwards. The FEIR determined that these modifications would not result in any new significant impacts, and that none of the modifications constituted “significant new information” requiring additional recirculation of the EIR.
Two groups, Save Our Capitol! and Save the Capitol, Save the Trees (collectively Plaintiffs), filed separate petitions for writ of mandate alleging CEQA violations, and the trial court denied both. Plaintiffs appealed, and their appeals were consolidated.
Project DescriptionOn appeal, Plaintiffs argued that changes to the location of the underground parking structure and the annex’s exterior glass design features, that were not disclosed until the FEIR was released, rendered the EIR’s project description inadequate, unstable, and vague. Plaintiffs alleged that DGS failed to meaningfully analyze whether the new annex’s glass exterior was compatible with the Capitol’s historic characteristics. They also argued that, by waiting to disclose the annex’s design until the FEIR was released, DGS denied the public the opportunity to meaningfully comment. Noting that the issue here was primarily about how much a project may change after a draft EIR is circulated before the project description is no longer accurate, stable, or finite, the Court analyzed the authority closest to the present case, Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters v. City of Los Angeles (2022) 76 Cal.App.5th 1154 (Carpenters).
In Carpenters, the court held that a mixed-use commercial/residential project that changed the composition and ratio of the residential to commercial footprint after the FEIR was released was not so different from the project alternatives in the EIR to conclude that the project definition was unstable. Much like Carpenters, the Court here determined that changes to the Project, such as moving the location of the underground parking garage, were not the type of...
